By Ross Martin, Accountancy Director at Hive Business.

It takes money to make money and today, thanks to ever stricter rules on tax planning, the same is true with your tax strategy. Increasingly, tactics only work if you have cash at your disposal.

Say you have £100,000 of surplus funds. With us you’ll be able to reap on average £25,000 of tax savings through things like tax efficient investments and retirement strategies.

But stop there for a second. If you’re the kind of person who earns £10,000 a month and spends it without really keeping tabs on where it’s gone (and, trust me, you’re not alone here — I see this all the time with “successful” dental practice owners) I’m afraid to say you’re really missing a trick because you could be significantly richer, if only you were just a little more financially mature.

Being financially mature simply means being financially aware. Indeed, you can pay someone else to be financially aware on your behalf but unfortunately that still doesn’t solve the problem. At Hive, for example, our time would be far more productively spent looking for ways to increase your wealth rather than reconstructing your financial books to ascertain that you really did earn £10,000 last month (even if the current account looks so depleted that you could have sworn you didn’t).

You’d be surprised how often our services are used (or, rather, misused) to this end — poring over months’ worth of transactions to establish the starting point retrospectively. Far better to produce an accurate forecast of what will be coming in in the next 12 months and then let us get to work on finding ways of creating surplus funds out of your cashflow to produce significant tax savings.

That’s how you get really rich because cash isn’t an end in itself but a building block to greater things. It’s building blocks and not gold bricks that build real wealth so there’s a fundamental difference between wealth and income. Real wealth means you have a successful strategy for what to do with all the money you make.

That’s not to say a high income isn’t extremely good news, but making an extra £25k on every spare £100k trumps it, as I’m sure you’d agree. So, if you’d like to make 25 cents on the dollar, as they say, get in touch on 01872 300232 or email us at hello@hivebusiness.co.uk.