Category: Self-Employment
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Regular Spending with an Irregular Income
How to plan your spending as an actor to ensure you’re saving enough when your income is high and surviving when work is slow. One of the biggest obstacles to self-employed actors getting a grip on their finances is a failure to budget properly for their irregular income. It’s easy to spend freely when earning…
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A Guide to Pensions for Self-Employed Actors
How to set up a pension as an actor and how much you should aim to save for your retirement. When you’re starting your acting career, retirement is probably at the back of your mind. Finding an agent, preparing for auditions and keeping your Spotlight up-to-date seem more urgent. Typically, actors are driven by a…
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How to Set Yourself Up as a Freelancer
When actors need to register as sole traders, how they calculate tax and how taking on additional work affects this. As a self-employed actor, whether you have an agent or not, you’re a freelancer. In most cases, for the purposes of HMRC, your legal status is ‘sole trader’. These terms might appear daunting at first,…
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Tax Tips for the Self-Employed Actor
How performers can register as self-employed and what is tax deductible as an actor. Being a performer requires a lot of work – you have to learn lines, film self-tapes and go to auditions – all while juggling the rest of your life. Self-employed actors in the UK also manage their financial aspects and are…
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Financial Mindfulness – Budgeting Tips for Performers
How to organise your finances and budget with ever-changing earnings. Money – or the lack of it – is not the obstacle to your success and goals but sitting blissfully in the ignorance of your financial health may well be. I can tell you from personal experience that by ignoring your finances and giving sole…
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A Guide to Tax Returns
What actors need to know about tax returns, National Insurance, VAT and allowable expenses. Article updated December 2022. As welcome as the onslaught of conversations about kale and dry January, is the fun of the tax return. Here to break it down and make it less daunting, are Chartered Certified Accountants, Breckman & Company, on…
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Pensions for Actors: How to Defuse the Savings Time-Bomb
IPSE partner with Spotlight to give us their article on managing pensions (Otherwise known as ‘how to stop worrying and defuse the savings time-bomb!’) Pensions. They’re not a comfortable thing to talk about, are they? You don’t like thinking about getting to retirement age – let alone the ticking savings time-bomb you’re sitting on. But if you’re…
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Tax for Actors: Get Your Tax In Gear
Cut through the tax panic attacks with these tips for all freelancers… What with us still reeling from the self-assessment deadline in January (or, what I like to call anti-Christmas) and going into a new financial year in April (or, what I like to call sad-new-year) what better time to dig our heels in and talk about our…
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Between Acting Jobs: The Journey from High Pay to No Pay
Actor John Currivan gives his advice on preparing for the big drop in income between acting work… Steady and high paying acting jobs are rare in our business. Having them makes us feel like we’re flying high! We eye the start date of a long-term contract like a pilot eyes up their launch schedule.…
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How to Secure Your Position in the UK After Brexit: Guide for Actors
The Immigration Advice Service gives us a guide for self-employed European actors Published: February 2019 In October 2018, I wrote a piece for Spotlight to provide initial guidance for EU actors looking to prepare for Brexit. In it, I mentioned the EU settlement scheme – which remains the most viable way to secure your status in the…