BrummieWife

Hi Everyone,
After 3 years in Sunny South Africa, We are looking to move back to UK (Birmingham) by the end of the year. I have few questions as below in regards to the move back.

1: We have saved up some money here in SA which we want to use to pay part of our mortgage back in UK. Does anyone know if the tax man will have any issues for us transferring the money back to UK ?

2: Is it better to transfer the money back to our bank account first and than make the mortgage payment or just transfer the money to the bank directly from whom we have taken the mortgage?

3: Does anyone know of a good company who we can use to move some of our stuff back to UK?

4: Will we have to pay custom duty & VAT on the things we are looking to move back to UK.

Thanks in advance

Kind Regards

SanDiegogirl

1. You savings will not be taxed by the UK taxman.

4. You do not pay customs/taxes/VAT on used personal items being imported into the UK.

BrummieWife

Hi,
Thanks for the reply.

Good to hear the saving wont be taxed as we were worried about it.

We were told by someone in UK that if we transfer amount of more than 50k+ than the bank will flag the transaction and will not credit the amount to our account unless we provide them with our business details in South Africa and some kind of tax certification. Not sure how true this is.

Editha

Question 2. Seems to me you can do either, providing your lender is happy.

HighCaper

Hi, I know a company that may be able to help with getting your stuff back to UK provided your in the KZN area ?

Pulaski

Make sure you have good documentation as to where the funds came from, how they came to be in your account.

A South African tried to buy my house in the UK and concerns about where he got the money from for the deposit, and possible money laundering, caused a delay in the sale of my house of several months while the bank investigated him and his money.

Re 4. IIRC you are exempt from duty on anything you have owned for 6 months before you brought it to the UK.

BrummieWife

Hi Everyone,
Thanks for the answer.

@HighCaper... I am based in Gauteng. Does that company operate from here?

@Pulaski... Thanks for the advise. The problem is i am getting confusing answers from Tax advisers in UK & here. The adviser who says that i need to provide proof of funds cannot really tell me properly what proof i need to provide .

Pulaski

Anything that shows where the money came from. If you built up the savings over three years from saving your salary, then three years of account statements that show the balance growing steadily, and pay slips that show that it was reasonable to be able to save that much.

If you sold something to realise the funds then documentation related to the sale, and hopefully something that shows that you had owned it for a long time, not just bought it a few days earlier to launder the funds. If you had only owned it a short time, something to explain why you were needed to sell it so soon, and where the money came from to buy it.

If it was the gain/ profit on something you bought then documentation on what you paid when you bought it and what you received when you sold it. And anything that shows why you were able to sell it for much more than you paid.

In short, literally anything you have or can obtain that shows where the money came from, and where it was before it was deposited in your account, whether another account or asset under your control or from someone else.

Editha

Is this because you are coming back from SA? Coming back from Canada, we transferred our savings and the proceeds of sale of our house, without having to prove anything.

Pulaski

Yes, SA is a much higher risk country, for money laundering purposes, than Canada is.

I personally experienced problems when trying to sell my home in London to an immigrant bringing his deposit from SA, because the bank he was getting his mortgage from wanted documentation to show where the funds came from. It delayed the sale by about two additional months.

The South African was the second buyer, the first buyer lined up by my agent ultimately couldn't get their mortgage for the same sort of reason - their deposit came from Iran and the bank couldn't get comfortable with the source of funds.

Editha

OK. Makes sense

BrummieWife

Thanks guys. let me get paper work in order first before i do any transfer.

feelbritish

You may think that but we were with our personal banker yesterday and he said they did flag us when we deposited a cheque from our house sale into a GBP account here in Canada, but because he was aware of us selling and moving back he sorted it out without us even knowing about it! Now we want to transfer this money to our UK account we found out we can only transfer US$100 000 a day so have to do this in smaller amounts. It seems that all countries are clamping down and it is not just from SA.

Editha

Interesting. We didn't transfer funds in one go. As you know our house sale was in 2013, and we transferred the proceeds over that year, then the rest of our savings went in 2014.
All our transfers were in CAD, with the exchange being made by our UK bank FirstDirect, which was giving us a better rate than RBC. I can't remember the exact amounts now, but certainly we were transferring a lot more than USD 100,000 in 2013.

Novocastrian

feelbritish said $100,000 per day, not per year. I suspect that she is referring to the HSBC Globalview facility. I almost ran into the same problem but did manage to circumvent the issue (largely through dumb luck).