Keep it, they tax it.
Give it away, you lose it.
Both of those are wrong. There is a third answer, and it has been sitting in the legislation the whole time. You can pass on the value and keep the income. You can hand over ownership and keep control. Most people are never told that.
The three questions
How much is enough?
The question your Map the Gap Report exists to answer. Before anyone suggests giving anything away, we work out - properly, in numbers - how much you need to live exactly the life you want, for as long as you live. Only then do we look at what happens to the rest.
Giving it away isn’t the same as losing control.
Ownership and control are two different things. UK law has always treated them separately. Used properly, that distinction lets you pass the value to your children while you keep the income, and the say, for as long as you want them.
Is it actually a business?
Five properties is a portfolio. Whether it is a business is a different question entirely - and the answer changes what is available to you. It is worth knowing before you plan anything.
Nobody plans to leave 40% to HMRC. They just run out of road.
You spent thirty years building it. Bought well, held on, remortgaged when it made sense, took the hits in 2008 and again in 2020, and came through with something worth having.
Now you are looking at what happens next, and the arithmetic is unpleasant. Above the available allowances, Inheritance Tax takes 40%. On a property business of any size, that threshold arrives almost immediately.
So you ask around. And you get told two things, both of which are half-true:
“Give it away seven years before you die.” Fine – except you need the rental income, you are not finished working, and nobody knows the date.
“Put it in a company.” Sometimes right. Often expensive, and it does not solve the thing you actually asked about.
What almost nobody says is that Parliament wrote down a long list of Reliefs, Exemptions and Allowances – deliberately, to be used – and that most families use hardly any of them. Not because they are hidden. Because nobody has ever sat down and worked through the list properly, in the right order, for their particular circumstances.
That is the whole job.
Three documents, then the work. No surprises.
The road less taxed runs through three written documents – your Opportunities Report, your Map the Gap Report, your Fix the Tax Report – and the first two are free. You can stop at the end of any step and keep everything produced up to that point. Nothing rolls on automatically.
- Free
Discover
The front porch
A conversation, the free tools, and straightforward questions in your own secure portal - your family, your property, and what you want to happen to it. Nothing is charged; the free tools and the fact-find do the work.
- Free
Your Opportunities Report
The road less taxed · part one · “What might be possible?”
Exactly one thing, given away free: the headline tax-saving opportunities in your own facts, each with an indicative size, and what it costs to leave things as they are. Every figure comes from the engine - no number is typed by hand. A screening document, not advice. Yours to keep either way.
- Free
Your Map the Gap Report
The road less taxed · part two · “How much is enough?”
Nobody gives anything away until they know what they must keep. We cash-flow model your whole financial life, year by year, to the second death - the life you want, the reserve you never dip below, the lumpy years - and show you, in today’s money, your number, your surplus, and doing nothing against doing something, side by side. It ends in a verdict: green, amber or red.
- £1,400
Your Fix the Tax Report
The road less taxed · part three · “What would you actually do, in what order?”
The plan itself - the first fee of the journey. Engagement letter first, then your written route-map: every planning domain on our register worked through against your facts, sequenced, each step’s worth and cost shown, with action against no action quantified throughout. Around fourteen hours of senior technical work; we contribute seven at our cost. The advice is signed, in writing, by a Chartered Tax Adviser.
- Quoted per item, in writing
Putting it in place
“Who does the work?”
Wills, trusts, gifting programmes, protection and structures. Each piece delivered by a named Expert in Residence. Fixed fee per item, in writing, before you commit. Never a percentage of your assets.
- Simple subscription
Your Living Plan
“How does it stay right?”
The subscription that keeps the plan current and compounds the allowances that renew each year. Two reviews a year, every gift tracked through its seven-year cycle - and, when the time comes, probate handled for your family, with next-generation takeover of the plan.
Everything up to and including your Map the Gap Report is free. Later fees are shown exclusive of VAT. Every fee is confirmed in writing before any work begins, and you can pause or stop at the end of any step.
And if the verdict is red, we stop. If Map the Gap shows the life you want is not yet safely paid for, we say so in writing, we propose no gifting programme, and we take no fee – because every pound given away would come from your own security. Nothing we ever propose touches what you need. That is not a door closing; it is the rule this firm works to.
This is not avoidance. And we can show you why.
HMRC uses the word broadly. Broadly enough that, taken at face value, claiming your Personal Allowance would qualify.
Here is what we actually use: Statutory Reliefs, Exemptions and Allowances. Written into the legislation by Parliament, on purpose, for people to use. Nothing else. No products, no arrangements bought off a shelf, nothing that depends on a view HMRC has not already seen.
Tried and tested only. You won’t be a guinea pig with us.
If something is novel, aggressive, or turns on an argument nobody has run yet, we will tell you so and we will not do it. That is not caution for its own sake. It is that a plan which collapses in ten years is worse than no plan at all – and your children will be the ones holding it.
Me, and whoever your plan actually needs.
I’m not a Chartered Tax Adviser.
After thirty-five years I still don’t know all the answers. But I’ve been asked every question, multiple times. My job is to work out what you actually need, and then to put the right person in front of it.
All tax advice reaches you in writing, from a Chartered Tax Adviser who is a current member of the Chartered Institute of Taxation, and who is responsible for that advice.
Around me sits a coterie of experts, drawn from across the professions. Which of them you meet is decided by the specific needs of your planning – not by who happens to be sitting on a payroll waiting for work. We call them Experts in Residence, and they are brought in when your situation calls for them.
Nothing here is off the shelf. There is no house solution waiting for your family to be fitted into it. Every plan is hand-built from one family’s facts, which is slower than reaching for a template and more expensive to run. It is also the only way the answer ends up being yours rather than ours.
One face to you. The right specialists behind it. Nobody learning on your time.Martin Beadle · Founder
Seventy-four editions of me thinking out loud.
Every one dated, published, and still there – including the ones where the law has since moved. It is the closest thing to a reference I can offer you: years of working through this in public, roughly three hundred words at a time.
An hour, on me.
Tell me what you own, what you want to happen to it, and what is worrying you. I will tell you honestly whether there is anything worth doing – including, sometimes, that there isn’t.
It’s time I can’t give you back. It may help generations of your family.