Hi all
New to this forum so hoping I do things right!

We’ve known for a little while that we would be moving back to UK from Perth, Australia so sold our house during the boom in Perth late last year. What we are struggling to find is information on financials and tax implications. In the first instance we have the proceeds from our house sale which will be used to purchase mortgage free when we get back, but when is the right time to move the money to the uk to avoid tax?

Does anybody have any recent experience in this space?

Thanks heaps 😊

All I can offer is that, when I returned from the US in 2006 I transferred money to buy my UK house at $2 to the £1, and it's never been as bad since. It seems like a difficult decision, but the best strategy is to exchange it and then stop looking at currency tables.

Are you referring to tax in Australia? Nothing would be due in the UK on it at any point as long as you can properly document that it came from the sale of your primary home.

Thanks for the response! That’s good to know 😊. We were under the impression that the uk could tax it as savings.

Thanks for replying. The exchange rates are what they are so we have no issue there, just a misconception about the uk potentially taxing the money as savings. Also wondering if it has to be moved over within a timeframe

Just moving your money from country X into the UK does not trigger any kind of tax calculation, you're essentially just moving it from bank A to bank B (which happen to be in different countries.) I've been moving my savings from the US into the UK for a few years now (including transferring funds used to purchase a house) and only pay tax on any interest/income earned. If you haven't already, I do recommend talking to your financial institutions about the best way to transfer funds, their FX rates and fees. Then compare the total cost (FX rate and fees) to something like eg Wise. You might also want to investigate whether it would make sense to make one large transfer (which might trigger fraud/money laundering alerts that slow things down) or several smaller ones. I'm sure others on this forum have more experience of moving large amounts.

You will pay tax on savings if you earn over a certain amount of interest (https://www.gov.uk/apply-tax-free-interest-on-savings), but that's nothing to do with moving the money from Oz. The same would apply wherever the money came from.

If you've moving a large sum back but then using it fairly quickly to buy another property, you'll be very unlikely to hit the savings interest threshold.

Good luck.

Hi, We did the same as you (sold our house in Perth and rented until our return) I use to transfer our money when the rates were good via Ozforex (this was back in 2010) so you may have more choice nowadays, we were not taxed on anything when we arrived in the UK, good luck exciting times ahead.

Incorrect. There is no tax on savings but savings interest will be assessable for tax at your marginal rate.

She is correct, and so are you, you both said the same thing in slightly different ways: you don't pay tax on savings (capital), you do pay tax on interest income on savings.