Offset expenses incurred in P2P against income for tax?

www.gov.uk/set-up-sole-trader

A few hoops to jump through it seems. Click on the self employed link as well, from what you said it doesn't look like you would qualify as self employed (although I know nothing except what I just read!). 

I don't think you can claim expenses as an individual.

Best advice I can offer is to find yourself a good accountant / tax advisor; you might be surprised at what can be claimed against and to what extent - use of home as office, broadband, any subscription fees you might have, etc, etc.  If claiming against those expenses aren't available to you in your current position, it might be that they could be sufficiently large to make it worthwhile putting your activities on a more formalised footing.

Needn't be expensive and you might need only use him / her the once and then use that advice as a template moving forward. 

Could be that the savings outweigh their fee, but - more importantly, IMO - you'll have greater assurance that what you are doing is right and so potentially avoid a nasty surprise in seven years time should HMRC decide to knock on your door.

(PS: As per mfaxford 's post; if you are in a position where you could / should still be making NIC's then at the very least be confident you have any requirement there covered.)

My own take on it is that one can only claim P2P losses against the gains in each individual P2P platform in other words I cannot claim losses from defaults in Zopa against gains in RS and vice versa but since we are increasingly covering our minimal tax burden by either p2p ISA's and investing only in Mrs Aju - whose tax burden is nil at this time - so we are not that affected. In fact this year I notified the tax man used last years interest which was much higher than this years estimate (it will be under £1000 for both of us) as the rates have dwindled in banking and we have all but bailed out of P2P for the time being. I told them this using our HMRC account (We both have workplace pension which almost categorises us similar to to PAYE) Neither of us has been asked to complete a self assesment as our tax affairs are somewhat basic to say the least.

Mind you one could not consider me to be an expert in this area just someone who has advised HMRC or our tax positions for last 10 years as things change and they always seemed happy and declared as such. That said the returns on Zopa and RS and others are probably already being passed to HMRC as are interest from banks etc so they will be aware if not capable of monitoring this sector at an individual level. They do still get these numbers incorrect and I occasionally advise of our changing circumstances.


 

There's a fairly helpful guide on this on 4thway here. 

I was talking about individual returns and merely following the statements made in the HMRC guidance which are clear that a tax return is required for anything except same platform losses. You are right that there is no specific mechanism in a tax return to idenfify claims under sideways or carried forward relief so records should be kept in the event of query

Thanks for the correction, my take was somewhat limited I admit as RS have not actually cost me any losses as such anyway and now won't with the dregs left behind there. The other aspect as you suggest is that I don't have enough of the losses to not be covered anyway by a single platform. Interesting perhaps for a better time in the future to bear this in mind and also when Mrs Aju does come in above the taxable threshold and can no longer use her for our tax reducing. Another aspect at present is that with rates so low everywhere we have punted quite a bit of spare fund into NS&I so tax is not an issue there. Slight aside we won £25 this month on our first 5 figure batch invested in November.

The SAIM's you provided may be useful going forward i've noted them in my Tax spreadsheet although not sure I want to be rsed with tax returns (even though they are probably only adding a single sheet to the main return) the other aspect is that p2p will have to both survive and also become viable again I guess - I mean in terms of risk etc for return. 

Edit: Crossed over the above post but I agree with bracknellboy and ilmoro regarding good records I can produce records of all our tax generating accounts and amounts going back years but I guess that's just pedantic me.