Can I have a dual-purposed limited company
I am an IT Consultant and have a limited company which I use to invoice my clients a daily rate for my consulting work.
Can I use this same limited company to buy property and then offset the gains losses ie process my taxes in one.
So for example the mortgage payments would be expenses; the rental payments would be income; my consulting would be income; my lunches would be expenses.
So what I am asking is can everything be housed in one single limited company.
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The pros and cons of combining the two different activities into one company have been discussed already. You may want to be clear that the alternative to one combined limited company is. Actualyl there are two alternatives:
Two separate limited companies, each owned by yourself. I.e. each company stands for itself, just by chance the beneficial owner and I guess the director are identical.
Two limited companies where one of them is owned by the other one.
Sometimes it makes sense to hand the profitable company underneath the loss making one. That sounds a bit counter intuitive, but it may serve the purpose you are looking for while at the same time keeping different things separated for credit rating purposes.
It's certainly logically possible to do all of those things within the same company. However, combining them will affect how other people see the company:
Someone lending the company money to buy a property will be concerned about their loan being repaid. If the company is also doing other things, that increases the risk that losses from those other things will make the company less likely to repay the loan, particularly if the property fell into negative equity. For example, if someone sues the company because of your consulting work. The lender would have to spend more time assessing the risk of that and might want to charge you more interest or not lend the money at all.
The risk of losses in one part affecting the other part also affects you directly. For example if your property ends up in negative equity then any consulting income might have to go to repay the mortgage, whereas if it was in a separate company you could protect it. (Of course, a mortgage company might see this as an advantage, but there'll still be a lot of uncertainty for them so they probably won't give it much weight).
When you shut the company down in the future, you might be able to get Entrepeneurs' relief if the main activity was trading. I'm not too familiar with the ins and outs of this, but I think consulting does count as trading whereas investing in property doesn't. So there's a risk you could make your consulting income ineligible for the relief by combining it with the property investment.
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