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Merrin Somerset-Web
Welcome to marantalks yous Money, the personal finance edition of Maren Talks Money. In these weekly podcasts, we talk about the best strategies for making the most of your money. I'm Meryn Somerset Web now this week I want to talk about offshore bonds.
As we inch closer and closer to budget day and the talk of increased taxation grows ever louder, so does the talk of leaving the UK altogether. And so does the conversation about how if you're going to stay in the uk, you can cut your tax bill. Now, one thing that comes up over and over again is offshore bonds. So what are they? To help me with that, I have Paula Steele, director of John Lamb Hill Aldbridge. She joins me here in the studio today. John Lamb Hill Aldridge is a Specialist Protection Assurance Advisor. We're going to ask her to explain that before we get going. And Paula specifically has worked in financial Services for over 40 years, currently focused on life assurance and later life planning for her clients. Paula, thank you so much for joining us today.
Paula Steele
It's a pleasure.
Merrin Somerset-Web
Paula, can we just start with that? Specialist Protection Assurance Advisor?
Paula Steele
We advise clients on buying life insurance and we're specialists because we deal with very, very high value life insurance for people who are looking to buy almost exclusively for inheritance tax planning. They're buying life insurance because they need to be able to manage the cash flow for paying the tax. The life insurance isn't a way of avoiding the tax. It just gives you the cash flow. So if you've got a 10 million liability, you know you've got a liability, you don't know when that liability is going to hit and you move the risk from your estate across into the insurance market. So that's what we do.
Merrin Somerset-Web
I see. Yeah, we could lose out, of course, under those circumstances if you lived for very significantly longer than you expected to.
Paula Steele
Well, that's the subject of risk. You can buy a life insurance policy that will pay out when you die. Regardless of that, some of the clients buy shorter term.
Merrin Somerset-Web
So we're going to come back to this. Actually not on this podcast, but this is another thing that I've actually had on our list, managing your IHT liabilities with life insurance. So hold on, listeners. We're going to come back to this another day, hopefully with Paula. So let's start on on today's actual topic. What is an offshore bond? What are we actually talking about here?
Paula Steele
An offshore bond is a life insurance policy with effectively either £100 or £1,000 of actual life insurance risk insurance and the rest is a holding structure for holding investments.
Merrin Somerset-Web
Okay. So it's basically it's a tax wrapper in the same way as an ISA and a pension.
Paula Steele
It's exactly the same as a wrapper. And if you compare it with an ISA or with a pension, all of them give you the ability to accumulate funds with no income tax, no capital gains tax. Internally, the pension currently works for inheritance tax but won't from April 27th. So from April 27th they will all be exactly the same in terms of allowing you to roll up income and capital gain without tax. The difference is that when you take the money out of the isa, to which you are restricted at the moment to paying 20,000 a year, you are not going to have to pay tax to get it out. Similarly, if you put money into a pension, you're getting tax relief on the way in, which you don't get if it's an ISA and you don't get if it's an offshore bond. And when you take the money out of a pension, apart from the tax free cash, you are paying income tax. And it's exactly the same with an offshore bond. So all of the gain is going to be subject to income tax as it is in a pension. So you've got your three main wrappers, isa, which is probably the most effective pension, Very effective because of the tax relief and the 25% tax free cash and finally the offshore bond.
Merrin Somerset-Web
So with the offshore bond, the money that goes in is already taxed and the money that comes out the other end is already taxed. So the only bit that is tax free is the accumulation while it is inside the wrapper.
Paula Steele
Exactly.
Merrin Somerset-Web
Okay. And then it has this sort of rather interesting thing whereby you're allowed to take 5% of the amount you originally put in out every year.
Paula Steele
You are. But that's on a tax deferred basis. Everybody says it's a tax free 5%. It's not. You can take out 5% without triggering some kind of tax in terms of the returns that you've got. And it's up to 5%. So it's really just a return of your own capital that's coming back to you without tax.
Merrin Somerset-Web
Okay. That's the interesting bit because people constantly say, oh, this is so amazing, you can take out 5% a year. To which I go, well, that's the money you put in in the first place, so this doesn't seem particularly marvelous. You can take out your own money on which you already paid tax without paying any more tax. This seems not particularly exciting.
Paula Steele
No, it's the returns which are tax free and they're not. They're tax deferred.
Merrin Somerset-Web
Exactly. And so you can do this for 20 years, you can take out 5%.
Paula Steele
Every year for 20 years or 4% for 25 years.
Merrin Somerset-Web
Yes. Okay. But effectively you can get all your original capital back.
Paula Steele
Yes. You can get all your original capital back at any time. The question is what your tax implications are of getting it back if you take out more than the 5%. Because if you take out more than the 5%, you're going to have to pay tax on the gain.
Merrin Somerset-Web
Yeah. So say for example, that I put £100,000 into an offshore bond and three weeks later I suddenly needed that money back, I would effectively end up paying my marginal rate of income tax to get my own capital back. Is that fair?
Paula Steele
Only on the gain. You would pay it on the gain. So if you put £100,000 in and it came out at £101,000 three weeks later, the 100,000 would be tax free. And the £1,000, if you're going to take it all out like that, and the £1,000 would be subject to income tax at your marginal rate.
Merrin Somerset-Web
All right, well, if you can. I think I'm just Not understanding this. If you can always at any time withdraw your original capital, why do people talk about how you can take out 5% of your own capital a year? Surely then you can take out 100% of your own capital every year.
Paula Steele
You can take out 100% of your own capital, but you've got tax implications. The 5% comes back without any tax implications because you're just deferring the gain. Because the 5% that you get out would normally be partly income and partly gain and income and partly your original capital.
Merrin Somerset-Web
Okay. So you leave the gain inside.
Paula Steele
You can leave the gain inside. If you take out more than the 5% accumulated, then you're having to pay tax on the element of the gain.
And there are two ways that that gets taxed, and that's where people need advice. Because you can find that you get a horrific tax charge if it's not properly handled.
Merrin Somerset-Web
Why?
Paula Steele
Because if you take out more than the 5% accumulated, they will treat the balance. Unless you're taking it out as a segment, they will treat the balance all as gain.
Merrin Somerset-Web
I see.
Paula Steele
Any provider will be able to provide you with an illustration showing how you can get money out with the minimum level of tax. But if you're taking more than 5%, you're going to have to pay on the capital gain.
Merrin Somerset-Web
Okay, I see.
Paula Steele
And the income that's been accumulated.
Merrin Somerset-Web
Right. And do you pay that at the rate of capital gains and the rate of dividend tax, or do you pay it as income tax? It's treated as income tax. This can be really dangerous.
Paula Steele
Yes. And you have the advantage. If you are already a 45% taxpayer, then you are going to pay 45% on the gain. If you are not a 45% taxpayer, you benefit from something called top slicing relief. And what that enables you to do is to take the gain that's going to be taxable, divide it by the number of years that you've held the product. So let's say that we'd made a 40,000 pound gain and we'd held it for 10 years. We would divide the gain 40,000 by the 10 years and we would add the 4,000 pounds to our income for that year. If that then moved you from, say 20 to 40%, you would have to pay 40% on the whole of the gain. But if it leaves you still in the 20%, you're only paying 20%. So there are ways to reduce the amount of tax by taking it, maybe splitting it over two particular tax years.
Merrin Somerset-Web
Okay.
Paula Steele
And understanding how top slicing works.
Merrin Somerset-Web
Is There a limit to how much you can put inside an offshore bond wrapper?
Paula Steele
No.
Merrin Somerset-Web
No. And are the fees on them generally of a higher level than you might expect to pay on an ordinary stocks and shares ISA wrapper, for example?
Paula Steele
Yes, you should be able to buy a stocks and shares ISA wrapper for almost no fees. The amount of fees that you're paying, you need to determine what are your investment fees and what are your wrapper fees. The wrapper fees are very dependent on the amount of money that's going to be invested. So at 100,000, you're probably looking at about 50 basis points, half of 1% a year for the wrapper. When you get up to, say, 10 million, then you're going to be down at about 15 basis points.
Merrin Somerset-Web
Okay.
Paula Steele
So the wrapper itself is not very expensive. If you do some projections forward and say, am I better off having a direct investment or am I better off? You're always better off in a nicer Am I better off in a direct investment or holding it through an offshore bond, taking into account the fees, then you should find that from about year five, you're better off net of tax in the offshore bond wrapper and net of all the fees. Now, it's slightly dependent on what somebody charges you to get into it because you're going to pay partly for the wrapper and partly for the advice.
Merrin Somerset-Web
Okay. And inside the wrapper, when you speak, when you talk about a direct investment, et cetera, what do people normally put inside their offshore bond, bearing in mind that it is a wrapper? Is this something that people normally use for just an ordinary. We might think of a straightforward equity bond portfolio. Or is it somewhere where people wrap up property or what's going on inside these wrappers?
Paula Steele
Personally, it should only ever be used for equity and bond portfolios. There was a point where somebody was running some kind of. You could put some kind of property in it. I think the general consensus is that that doesn't work. There is an issue if clients want to hold direct equities, because if they hold direct equities, they have to be held through a discretionary fund manager on a standardized portfolio. Otherwise the portfolio runs the bond. And this is perhaps one of the biggest risks. The bond falls into what's known as the PPB rules, which is the highly customised bond rules which give you a 15% tax charge on the whole thing every year, unrecoverable. So if you're holding direct equities, they're going to have to be held with a discretionary Fund manager. If you're happy to hold funds, then you can DIY it yourself or you don't have to have a discretionary fund manager.
Merrin Somerset-Web
Okay, so you can get your wrapper, buy a couple of ETFs, chuck them in, bring the cost of the whole thing down, you can. All right, I think I'm on top of this now. But as far as I can see, then this is something you wouldn't touch with a barge pull until you'd absolutely used up all your allowances in your other wrappers. So until your sip was pretty full and you used your ISA allowance every year, etc. This is very much the last choice of wrapper.
Paula Steele
I think it's the last choice of wrapper if you're going to hold it in the very long term. Because the pension wrapper because of the effective gearing, the leverage of the tax relief.
The pension, because at the end of the day you are going to pay income tax on all on 75% of the pension fund when you get it out.
But on the other hand you are getting tax relief on the way in. If you are going to leave the uk, One of the attractions of offshore bonds is that if you leave the UK and let's say that you go to Dubai, where a lot of people are going at the moment, you will be able to surrender it with no tax charge. Now if you come back within five years, then there'll be a catch up on you. But let us say that you had a bond, you'd put £100,000 in it, it's now worth 200,000. You decide that you're going to move to Dubai, you will be able to take all of that out. Better to wait till the following tax year with no tax because there's no tax to pay in Dubai. But if you then come back within the five years, there'd be a catch up tax charge.
Merrin Somerset-Web
This is like those lovely days when you could move to Portugal and take everything out of your pension entirely tax free. Don't think you can do that anymore, can you?
Paula Steele
Depends on the double tax agreement. So if you go to somewhere like Cyprus, you can take it out tax free because it's pension arrangements. If you are in receipt of a state pension, if you go to Malta, I think there's a flat rate of tax. If you go to Italy, well, it depends if you're on the flat rate or if you've gone into the 7% rate. But it will depend on whether the double tax agreement says that pensions are to be taxed where you're going to or where you currently are, and that's dependent on the agreement.
Merrin Somerset-Web
Okay. There's another podcast in that. Gosh, Paula, I feel like we're going to be hearing quite a lot from you over the next few months.
Paula Steele
I'd be delighted.
Merrin Somerset-Web
Wonderful. Can I end on the question about who shouldn't have an offshore bond? Because, you know, watching this, as I have for many decades now, I see an awful lot of articles and suggestions online that people who I'm not sure should have offshore bonds should look at them who shouldn't have one.
Paula Steele
If you are going to need a large amount of capital suddenly now nobody knows what's going to happen going forward. It should be money that is going to be invested in the long term because you can buy these onshore as well. I think that they are more sophisticated as tax wrappers than sometimes people think. Within the John Lambhill Aldridge business, we're a specialist provider in that we don't have an investment proposition. Most of these bonds are being sold by people who are wrapping up an existing portfolio or want to wrap a portfolio going forward, but they want the investment management. And I think it's very much dependent on what people want to do. Is the additional cost worth it for them? And are you trying to do a wrapper? Because sometimes, particularly in the UK market, they would be sold with a discounted gift scheme attached to it or with a gift and loan scheme which makes them inheritance tax effective because as they stand alone, they are not inheritance tax effective. The asset stays in your estate.
Merrin Somerset-Web
Okay, explain the gift and loan scheme a little further.
Paula Steele
Say that I want £100,000. I would quite like it to go to my kids, but on the other hand, I sort of would quite like to keep it. So I think a lot of people.
Merrin Somerset-Web
Feel exactly like that.
Paula Steele
But I don't think I really need any gain. So what a gift and loan scheme does is it says, I'm going to set up a trust, I'm going to lend the trustees £100,000 and they're going to pay me back 5% a year. But all of the gain is going to be for the benefit of my kids. So it's very long term planning because it's going to take 20 years for it to get out of your estate. But if you've got clients in their 60s, 70s, for whom they haven't really got surplus capital, but they don't feel that they're going to need it, it's a good way to hold onto assets, continue to take something out of it, but give the future gain away.
Merrin Somerset-Web
Okay, what do you think the political risk is here? I mean, these kinds of products, if you were a politician and your brief was to take care of ordinary people, you might look at the ISA wrapper, which may be changing the budget, and at the SIP wrapper and say, well, you know, that's good enough for most people. Why on earth do we have available this third rapper that allows? Really? From our conversation, I think we can both agree that it's maybe not your billionaires, but it's certainly the very, very comfortable who would use a product like this. Surely there must be political risk around this kind of rapper. I mean, I can already feel myself coming over all reeves and saying, well, that said, away with that one.
Paula Steele
I think that we are no longer in Europe. It is the holding mechanism of choice in Europe.
So they would need to say they're going to change the taxation of life insurance policies.
Merrin Somerset-Web
Okay.
Paula Steele
I'm sort of weird in that I've been in the same job for over 40 years. It's quite a long time really. But when I started, our clients were paying 98% tax. They paid 83% income tax, 15% investment income surcharge, and lots and lots of money went into offshore bonds and onshore bonds. There's a very, very long track record of them being there. In theory, the government will get more tax because you're going to pay income tax rather than capital gains tax. So if you look at the way that they project forward, they would be saying, well, actually we'll get more tax than we would if they held the item. But on the other hand, we're in a different political world today and everything has political risk. Yeah, I think probably I'd wait if I was going to think about an investment at the moment, I'd wait till after the budget.
Merrin Somerset-Web
Yes, well, you're not alone there. Everybody's waiting for everything until after the budget. But why? We are where we are. Brilliant. Well, Paula, thank you so much for joining us today and I hope that we will be hearing from you again.
Paula Steele
It's been my pleasure. I've been delighted.
Merrin Somerset-Web
Thanks for listening to this week's Maryn Talks yous Money. If you like our show, rate, review and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. Also, be sure to follow me and John on X or Twitter erinsw and John underscore Stepek. This episode was produced by Sam Asadi and Moses Andam Sound designed by Blake Maples and Aaron Casper. Questions and comments on this show and all our shows are always welcome our show. Email is merrinmoneyloomburg.
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Podcast Host: Merryn Somerset Webb (Bloomberg)
Guest: Paula Steele (Director, John Lamb Hill Aldridge)
Date: November 19, 2025
This episode dives deep into the world of offshore bonds: what exactly they are, how they work, and which investors they’re best suited for. Merryn Somerset Webb is joined by Paula Steele, a highly experienced specialist in protection and assurance, to demystify these tax-efficient investment wrappers. Together, they discuss tax implications, structural details, best use cases, common misconceptions, and the political risks around offshore bonds—clearing up who truly benefits from these products.
On 5% Withdrawals:
On Complexity and Confusion:
Warning on Tax Pitfalls:
On Political Risk:
Not for:
Tone: Relaxed but precise, breaking down complex tax structures and deflating common myths, with both participants showing healthy skepticism toward over-marketed offshore solutions.
In Merryn’s words:
"If there's one thing you take away, it's that these are far from the most exciting or efficient wrappers—until your other options run out, and even then, proceed with caution and professional advice."