I write this hoping for advice from readers! I have a full time consulting company, which is where I get my funds to invest.

Over the last few years, that company has now passed the banking threshold to safely store funds in a single institution. It is still making money, as I am still full time consulting for a couple of clients as my day-job. The money that remains is now no longer deemed “rainy day” money, as there is sufficient for me to survive a year or so without actual work. However, given it is still gaining money as a company, and it is not tax efficient to withdraw that money, should I not invest it as the company so it is not losing money to inflation? My thoughts are I should and I expect a whole series of blogs to indicate that.

The outline plan will be to first get the LEI number I require from the stock exchange – then sign-up for a trading account as a Ltd (many companies offer this I have found). My question to others who have done this is what limits should I place on this trading? My understanding is my gains from this should be limited to 20% of the companies overall turnover to avoid any issues from HMRC – which actually should be reasonably easy to handle in the early years. The actual assets held, I was thinking of keeping it in a moderately reasonably ETF that pays dividends (something like Merchants), and stays about same “value” – allowing withdrawal of the dividends back to the business as income, and this will easily stay under 20%, but will end up earning me a 4-5% ROI instead of the 0.5%-1% in the bank. It’s probably a better bet in the long term.

There have been a few previous posts on this from a few people – but I’m yet to find others actually doing this (such as this article from Foxy) – my accountant advised that I should still limit my turnover and it is “simpler” to do on same Ltd. I’m personally unwilling to setup a 2nd Limited company but interested how many others have actually done this. So please comments please on advice on this, given even forum searches, I’ve yet to find many people actually doing this.