AIBU to think a £2m homeowner should pay mansion tax?

[LadyJos]

Anyone read the Telegraph Article about the 93 year-old man paying mansion tax on his £2m Richmond Home he bought for £15,000? AIBU but isn't £15,000 to £2m a fairly good return over 60 years, and shouldn't he pay some tax at the end? I can't help thinking since the home is mortgage-free, he has options here to pay the £2500 a year...
‘I’m a 91-year-old veteran about to be dragged into mansion tax. This is wrong’
www.telegraph.co.uk/money/property/house-prices/91-year-old-about-dragged-into-mansion-tax/

Its only a benefit to the person as in provides some options to escape to the country for cheaper prices. Many of us wouls prefer house prices hadnt gone crazy because we have kids so how does it help when you have 1 house but 2 kids trying to buy later on at 100% extra and kids are only teens...
Our wages would hae to pay 17k a year mortgage but wages havent risen.

I mean the guy /family will likely owe iht on 1m so at 40% thats 400k in up to 10years. So its not like any kids of his can move in there.

People make choices about where to live or retire etc on what the costs are and lkkely to be.
A lvt for eg may start at 0.48% but how quickly would it go up. And how wrong for all cou cil services to be paid only by owners where would motivation to buy be? Over 20year ours is 40k CT. Homeowners already surely paying the bulk of care home fees?

Or are we going to cap off the saving of 1-2k from UC/DLA/pip for any renters?

the elderly especially in the South are likely to be in this position, however that are asset rich and cash poor and can’t afford to actually pay , so should they sell a home they have lived in for 60 plus years just to pay a tax bill from a greedy Government?

the same house in the North will be substainally cheaper, so why should those in the South who have worked hard all thier life have to pay something when others won’t? It’s already difficult with cost of living issues in the south

we are all taxed to the hilt during out working life, we pay tax on our salary, but if we save and interest exceeds £1k or £500 pa depending on your tax band that money saved after you pay tax is taxed again. We pay inheritance tax at 40% capital gains tax on properties at whatever and so it goes on

there is only so much of a pot.
Instead of hammering house owners they need to start looking at Amazon etc, amd make sure they pay more in tax

I never understand this. There is no part of the country where someone is forced to buy a £2m house. Even in London, that’s an exceptional budget with 99% of people not living in houses worth that much. These posts make it sound like they had no choice

I just did return flights LHR > JFK - dates not important.

How about any adult passing through border control pays a £50 per person every time they go in and out of the country. You can afford the trip, so you can afford to pay this levy. It’s £50 per entry or exit.
Yeah - we already do

• £1,439.39
• Fare
• £876.00
• Air Passenger Duty (Apd)
• £102.00
• Passenger Service Charge Departures
• £50.79
• Passenger Civil Aviation Security Service Fee
• £4.20
• Transportation Tax International Departure Including Ak And Hi
• £17.60
• Transportation Tax International Arrival
• £17.60
• Aphis Passenger Fee Passengers
• £2.90
• Immigration User Fee
• £5.30
• Customs User Fee
• £5.60
• Passenger Facility Charge
• £3.40
• Carrier Imposed Charge
• £354.00

this is just wrong. sorry

He doesn’t feel “entitled to the return”, there is no “return” - it’s his home. It’s people like you and this Government who are clawing at his assets wanting to make some cash out him. In the normal course, he would die in his own good time (which is not how you “realise a return”) and the state will take their share in inheritance tax at 40% and the remainder of his wealth he can leave in his estate.

If Council Tax needs to go up is this really the fairest way to do it? I’m not sure why it needs to be on the value of the home rather than the square foot size, why should this be yet another tax only Londoners have to worry about?

Exactly! And I feel sorry for a local family who have been made to leave their council house as it's very stressful for them (even though a lot of people are having a go at them saying they've never worked) so maybe I'm just a bleeding heart liberal.
But we shouldn't be forcing people out just to get more tax out of them.

It’s amazing what we can learn if we take the time to look and don’t make assumptions all the time!

That’s kind of the point with luck. You don’t earn it and all too often your birth circumstances dictate whether you can even benefit from luck.

In systems that redistribute wealth, it is most equitable to skim off a small tax from unearned wealth. The piles of money that just fall into a person’s lap instead of money earned or saved.

the state will take their share in inheritance tax at 40% and the remainder of his wealth he can leave in his estate.

You think they wont have trusts and stuff set up to avoid paying tax? I'm not commenting on this individual person as I dont know them, and the article was paywalled - but any high net worth (eg house worth £2m) would be stupid not to

different calculators give different answers but consider this

Average wages for a man in 1966 was circa £1000 per year so £15k was 15 times average salary.

and then of course there is the dropping off fee now

his home is onyl worth that at the expense of younger people. He didn’t earn it
And with this attitude, it is no surprise that young people have so little ambition and only cares about instant gratification.

Let's earn as little of our money, get as much as we can from others and just spends on stuff that is not needed because who knows what will happen tomorrow.

What a spoilt, entitled and lazy attitude. Is this really speaking for millenniums or generation Z? Or just the low er of the low of our society?

The average UK house price in 1960 was £2,263.
That man's house was 6.6 times as expensive as the average house at the time.

I mean an extra £50
Called “emergency additional tax to enter or exit the UK”
I mean if you can afford those other costs, then why not an extra 50
Or, you can not go.

I know there are a shit load of stealth taxes and charges that already exist. That’s kind of the point. We are taxing the shit out of ordinary people, before going after the people paying sod all, with mansions and goodness knows what else in family trusts or whatever.

So where you find the funding for what the country needs?

Because current taxation isn’t enough.

if you don’t want to tax those who can most afford it - do you want to tax those who can least afford it?

do you want to give exemptions on a certain age? And do those exemptions apply even to the very wealthy?

or would you rather see services cut? In which case which ones?

@AgnesMcDoo Equity release is, in effect, a mortgage. A loan. It’s very very expensive and forcing people to do this is abhorrent. It’s extremely unfair to many older people in London who won’t have the ready means to pay this. It’s the politics of envy and it’s patently unfair as no one has been able to save for it.

But these are all items that have been added over time. And they will keep adding.

and I wonder if the state will get any IHT upon his death or whether the govt trying to slap him for £2.5k will have alerted him to set up a family trust or however people avoid IHT. Because trying to slap him for £2.5k might have cost them a potential £400k receipt 🤣

So what do you prefer to reduce inequality?

Taxing your wages more or increasing student loan interest or hiking VAT or taxing unearned wealth accumulated through pure luck of multi-millionaires?

Which is fairest? Which actually redistributes wealth from the top 2% to the lowest 25%? And which redistributes wealth in the opposite direction?

Most of the UK’s wealth is in its housing bubble stock. It is more fair to tax that than it is to increase VAT on food which would only make the top 2% richer and the bottom 25% poorer.

Round of applause for you!

Everyone seems to have plenty of say about how the country needs rapid investment, but absolutely no desire to be the people paying for it.

£15,000 was a huge amount to pay for a house 60 years ago. He's a very wealthy man, and always has been.
I'm saving my violin strings for those who need them.

But that wouldn't be done through some kind of mansion tax or land value tax, because it would target anyone who owns a higher value property, no matter when they bought it. Someone buying a £2m home today would be paying about £150k in stamp duty, are they really under taxed on that asset?

What you are talking about is people who have benefited from outsize house price growth during the period of ownership - which could be targeted by reforming capital gains tax to remove private residence relief, although there is a risk that it would disincentivise downsizing.

I also don't really understand why someone would pay £2m for a house and this guy didn't. He bought it 60 years ago and it's gone up in value.

But we live in an area that has seen house prices rising due to "them Londoners" moving out of London because they simply can't afford to buy where they grew up and it pushes up our house prices. My fairly modest property was valued at nearly £600k last time I looked. It doesn't stand out on our street, it's typical of the other properties. We didn't pay that much for it then, couldn't afford to buy it now and can't control the external factors that have contributed to the rapid increase recently.

How my own son is expected to buy somewhere local is a mystery. Theoretically he could inherit this property, but I expect it will be swallowed up in care costs.

The proposed mansion tax would only be £2.5k?! Fucking hell. this man is in a £2m house and claims he can’t afford £2.5k? Fuck off. He’s having you all for thickos 😂