Transcript

Enda Brady: Good morning, everybody! And thank you for joining us. My name is Enda Brady, Certified Financial Planner and co-owner of iQ Financial with my brother Coman. You’re all very welcome.

This morning’s session is called The Financial Success Blueprint for Business Owners in 2026. What we’re doing this morning is something we’ve never done before, and it’s built around 3 simple steps.

Step 1 is that we’re going to give you a clear blueprint, or checklist, based on the 21 years that we’ve been working with business owners, covering the 5 areas that we get asked about most, and the 5 areas that matter most to the business owners that we help.

Step 2 involves some participation from you. Step 2 is that we’ll ask you a small number of questions over the course of the next 20 or 25 minutes to help you identify what’s covered in your own situation. Or where you may have some gaps.

And step 3, and probably the most important step, after today, you’ll be offered a complimentary Take Action meeting in July or August. And our commitment to you and the benefit you will be getting from that meeting is that we will help you address at least one financial area, you may need addressed.

Before we get started, some housekeeping to help us make the most of our time. I’ll hand you over to Maria Devine, our Senior Financial Planning Administrator and Office Manager here at iQ Financial.

Maria Devine: Hello, my job today is to keep things running smoothly. We’ve hosted a number of webinars over the years, and today we’re trying something a little different. So, during the session, we’ll ask you a few questions. We’d really encourage you to take part and answer based on your own situation.

Your responses are completely confidential, only Enda and I can see what you submit through the Q&A, and you can also choose to answer questions anonymously. This is a great opportunity to identify any gaps in your current situation after the webinar. And we’ll offer a complimentary TakeAction meeting or call to help you address at least one of those gaps.

So just to clarify how it works, when you write your answers in the Q&A to the questions we ask, these are private to the presenters, Enda and myself. If you have any questions of your own, you can also put these in the Q&A, and we’ll answer all of these at the end. Also, only the presenters can see the full list of attendees. Other attendees cannot see each other’s names. And if I have any links, I’ll put these in the chat, because these are visible to everybody.

Finally, everyone who registered for our webinar today will receive a recording and a copy of the slides, access to our guides for business owners, and a complimentary Take Action meeting to help you address your gaps.

So, I’m going to hand back to Enda.

Enda Brady: Thanks, Maria. Just, briefly, a quick word on iQ Financial. I know there’s some people who registered for the webinar who have not been on one of our webinars previously, so just very briefly. At iQ Financial, we provide financial planning and investment management to business owners and professionals. We work with owners who want to sell, retire, or make work optional in the next 5 to 10 years. We look at your overall financial situation and help you plan for retirement, reduce taxes, provide for your family, and invest wisely.

www.iqf.ie is the best place to learn more about our business.

So, the participation, starts up front. We’re trying to make sure that we make this as practical as possible, but in doing that, we really want to make sure that we give you as much specific value to your situation as possible. So, we will ask you a few short questions, as we’ve mentioned. They’re all confidential, and you can use the Q&A to answer this question. So, before we get into our checklist, before we get into the lessons we’ve learned over the last 21 years, we want to pose a question to you this morning.

What is your biggest financial concern today?

Please type in the Q&A, and we’ll answer and address all of these in the webinar, before we finish. So, please use the Q&A, folks. I’ll give you 10 or 20 seconds. What is your biggest financial concern today?

We have a big relief here, the Q&A is working! Okay, thanks guys. So, at any point, if what we’re talking about prompts a question in you, please include it there, but for any of your questions, we’ll address these before I finish. Thanks for those answers. So, from our 21 years of experience.

We’ll just show you the checklist now, or the financial success blueprint that we have, that we have created. From our 21 years of experience, everything meaningful falls into these five areas. So, these are the most impactful areas we have been asked about by our clients.

So, the first area is, how do I plan for the future, and what should my targets be?

The second area is how do I be as tax-efficient as possible and reduce my taxes?

The third area is, how do I provide for and protect my family?

The fourth area is, how do I invest? Where should I put my money to work for the long term?

And increasingly, over the last 10 years, we’re getting more and more questions around exit planning. So, business owners questioning us as to how they deal with the whole transition out of their business, and how they can do that as efficiently as possible. We have distilled 3 or 4 questions in each of these 5 areas. There’s a total of 18 on your checklist or your blueprint, but they fall under them main five areas that have been most important to our clients. So, we’ll explain these 5 areas to you, and we’ll explain to you why they’re important and the type of questions we get, and we’ll pose one gem of a question in each of the areas for you. To give you an opportunity to check how you are in relation to that area.

So, the first area we consistently get asked about is, how should I plan going forward, and what targets should I have?

From our experience, there are 3 key things that really matter here, and these are the first 3 things in our blueprint or our checklist. Firstly.

Do you actually have a financial plan that guides your decisions? Are you making decisions piecemeal, or in some way, have you a documented financial plan that is detailing what’s important to you and where you need to get to?

The second thing is that is really important is, do you know your financial independence number?

That is the amount of personal assets that you have to accumulate, so that at that point, work becomes optional for you.

And third and finally, we found that in the most successful situations, your life partner or your spouse is aligned with you, and you discuss your finances with them. So, are you aligned with your spouse or partner on what you’re trying to achieve financially?

At the centre of all good planning is knowing your number, and the reason knowing your number is really helpful for all your planning and all your targets is that if you sit down to prepare your personal financial plan for your household.

What you’ll be doing is that you’ll be listing what’s important to you.

You’ll be looking at an ideal lifestyle for yourself and your household, and you’ll be putting some numbers beside that. You’ll know what the lifestyle will cost, you’ll allow for inflation, and you’ll know the type of assets, the type of personal assets you might need to provide for that lifestyle.

The benefit here is that once you know that number, once you know your minimum target personal net worth, it improves all of your other decisions. So you can decide, then, how much salary you take from your business, just on the next slide there, Maria.

You can know how much you need to invest each year when you know your personal asset target.

You can understand what investment returns you need, and you’d also know if selling your business is on the cards for you. You’ll know the kind of minimum value you’ll need if you sell your business. And it’s not just about the number. So, we shouldn’t use the target and be a slave to it, particularly when we’re starting off on our journey of building wealth.

But when you do have a plan, you’re not making ad hoc decisions, and you’re not second-guessing. And you’re then able to know, well, if I start taking these steps, I’ve maximized my chances of achieving my personal asset goal. And the real benefit is, there’s so much inertia when it comes to personal financial planning.

So often, we see loads of business owners who are on top of their numbers from a business perspective, but they’re less comfortable and less confident about how they are in terms of where they are in terms of their own personal net worth.

And when you have your plan, and you know the steps you need to take to get there, the biggest power is giving you the confidence to actually take those first steps. You can’t predict the future, but when you actually take action, you’re giving yourself the clarity and confidence that you’ve made the best you can make with your financial decisions, and you haven’t left it on the long finger.

So, our second attendee question in relation to our financial success checklist is in the area of planning and targets. Can you use the Q&A again please folks, and let me know:

Do you have a financial plan guiding your decisions? Yes or no? For speed, you can stick in Y or N, whatever is easiest to you. Please let us know if you have a financial plan guiding your decisions.

Thanks, guys. Coming in there. Very good. Thanks, folks.

What we’re going to do is that when we get the summary of all of these answers, we’re going to share that information with you in an aggregate level, not any personal information, so you know how your situation compares to the other business owners on this webinar. But thank you very much for answering that question.

The second of five areas that we find is particularly important is the major question about tax.

So, how do I reduce my taxes? And you can ask questions about that, both in terms of their business and personally, and how can I be as tax-efficient as possible? And we find, in terms of your personal financial planning, there are four things that really matter here.

So, if you could just go on to the next slide there, Maria, we’ll show the guys the four items on the checklist that really matter when it comes to being tax-efficient.

Do you take a salary from your business? You’d be amazed. We see circumstances where business owners who may have a couple of things going on do not take a salary from a business. So, do you take a salary, and do you maximize your PRSI, your pay-related social insurance contributions, which qualifies you for a state pension?

Secondly, where appropriate, do you employ your life partner or family members and maximize their PRSI and pension contributions and pension benefits?

Thirdly, do you have a tax advisor for guidance?

And are you positioned to avail of what’s called Capital Gains Tax reliefs on the sale or liquidation of my business? Every business owner has what’s called a Capital Gains Tax lifetime relief threshold. So, if you sell or exit your business through your lifetime there are amounts that you can get when you either close the business or sell the business that is not subject to Capital Gains Tax. So, Capital Gains Tax is, 33%, and that applies when you sell a business. But you can get some of your sale proceeds without having to pay Capital Gains Tax. It’s a lifetime limit, and every business owner can avail of these.

That point on the checklist is, do I have a tax advisor for guidance, and am I positioned to avail of those Capital Gains Tax reliefs on the sale or liquidation of my business?

And the final area on our blueprint, or on our checklist that we’ve found to be most important when it comes to being tax-efficient is, do I make tax-efficient pension contributions through my company or personally? Having those four areas in place will make sure you’ve gone a long way to getting your bases covered and being tax-efficient in terms of your personal finances.

To give you a little bit more information on some gems of information around being tax-efficient, we find that there are two levels to this. In terms of the options for taking wealth from your business, there’s advice and there’s things you can do which really every single business owner should do. So, the first thing, as we’ve mentioned, is taking a salary. And making pension contributions.

Your pay-related social insurance, your PRSI, our parents used to call it stamps, is often underestimated. The state pension in Ireland today, so when you make your PRSI contributions from the age of 66, you’re entitled to what’s called a state contributory pension, because you’ve contributed the PRSI contributions to entitle you to that amount of money.

That is worth over €15,000 a year if you’ve made the maximum number of contributions that you can make. And to put that in context, if you wanted to save up some money in a savings or investment account and be confident that that investment would provide you with over €15,000 a year, you’d need an investment value of about €320,000 or €330,000. So, for a couple, the capital value, or the private value, of your state pension is about €650,000 for a couple. So, it’s an important part of the finances of every household. So, salary and PRSI are a must-do in terms of Level 1 tax efficiency for every business.

Included in that is your private pension, pension funding. Setting up a pension account, and having your business make contributions on your behalf is arguably the most powerful tool available to build personal wealth outside your business for business owners. So, your contributions can come directly from your business.

When you have funds in a pension, for as long as they’re in the pension, they can grow tax-free. It’s the only account available in Ireland, it’s the only investment account that business owners can know that regardless of the profit they make, or the return that they make, if their money is prudently invested, as long as their money is in the pension, it can grow tax-free, and if prudently invested over time, benefits from compound returns tax-free. You can also access pension funding in tax-efficient ways. You can take a lump sum tax-free, and you can also take a tax-reduced lump sum.

And you can stage when you take the balance of your money in the tax system to make sure that the income tax you take on your pension is manageable. So, you can access your pension in a tax-efficient way through your lifetime also. And, as part of Estate Planning, if, God forbid, you don’t get to spend all of the money you’ve accumulated in your pension, it’s available to your spouse in a tax-free lump sum, if, God forbid, you die prematurely. So, the most effective way to extract money from your business as a business owner, Level 1 tax efficiency includes a pension for definite.

Hiring family where appropriate, we have mentioned that and also Capital Gains Tax, relief. There’s just two I’ll mention at a high level. We have three other webinars in the tax area, and we can share them with you, and you can look at this in more detail. But I should tell you about Entrepreneur Relief and Retirement Relief .

Entrepreneur Relief and Retirement Relief are there to allow you to receive some of the proceeds from your business. If you liquidate it and sell the stock and have cash in the business, or if you sell it to a third party and they buy the shares, in your business, you’re allowed to get lifetime amounts of a profit from the sale or liquidation of your business without paying a Capital Gains Tax bill. And the Capital Gains Tax bill is 33%. So, to give you an example, one of the most common reliefs used is Entrepreneur Relief. Now, there are conditions associated with when you can take this relief.

They typically are available from age 55. You have to be working in the business and a director in the business for more than 10 years, and it has to be your main employment. There are a number of anti-avoidance measures, but the vast majority of businesses will be able to avail of this.

If you receive Retirement Relief, typically amounts can be sheltered from Capital Gains Tax up to €750,000. And to put that in context, if you were able to receive the first €750,000 from your business when it’s liquidated or sold, and you didn’t have a Capital Gains Tax bill on that €750,000, the relief saves you €247,500.

The other relief there is called Entrepreneur Relief. It works a little bit differently. Up to 90% of the first million and a half, and that’s just changed in the last budget, up to the first million and a half that you get from the sale or liquidation of your business is taxed at only 10%, so you get 90% of up to the first million and a half of qualifying assets. So, these are lifetime limits, as we’ve said before, but they’re available to everybody, so we should know how to set up our business to make sure that when it comes to the business being passed on, sold, or liquidated, that you’ve made sure that you’ve made the most of those reliefs.

It is worth saying, those reliefs are for each individual, so where it’s appropriate to have your life partner working in the business, there’s the opportunity to use the relief for both yourself and your life partner if they’re taking an active role in your business. These will significantly reduce the tax you pay when you exit your business.

The next area in taxes, just to mention them so you know what’s involved in the area, we would call them more specialist, or level 2 type of tax advice, are things like, when your personal asset level is strong, and you’re likely to be in surplus in your lifetime, so you know the amount you need for yourself and your household, and it’s likely that you’re going to have more assets than that. There are different vehicles that can be used. Holding companies, and also personal holding companies, and there’s also a thing called family partnerships that can be used in succession planning with your family, and used, in general, as part of Estate Planning. There is also, one of the ways to exit your business and pass it on, particularly to family members, is a thing called a share buyback. We’ve seen some examples of that.

And finally, we get more questions from individuals where you would be in a couple, and one member of the couple is originally from another country. Normally, the United States or the United Kingdom, but this area is creating much more questions now in recent years than before that, and understanding where you are from a tax perspective, where your tax residency is is a level 2 tax consideration, and something that requires, like these, all four of these items here, something that, requires some advanced tax planning. But your personal financial planner should be helping you and prompting you to have a look at these areas and know if these areas are likely to be applicable and helpful in your situation.

That’s the checklist, and the blueprint, and the key four areas in relation to being tax efficient. So the question I’m going to pose to you today is:

Do you have a tax advisor for guidance?

And are you positioned to avail of applicable Capital Gains Tax relief on the sale or liquidation of your business? You can answer Y or N or S [Somewhat] if you’re part of the way there, but you mightn’t have the advice finished. Do you have a tax advisor for guidance, and are you positioned to avail of the CGT reliefs on the sale or liquidation of your business.

Thanks, guys. The answers are coming in there. Thank you, folks.

In our financial success, Blueprint, our checklist for business owners, the third of five areas, the third major area, that we get asked about a lot from business owners is:

How do I protect and provide for my family?

And from our experience, we’ve created four, four key questions for our checklist that should ensure that you have your bases covered from a personal finance perspective.

When it comes to providing for and protecting your family, firstly, do you have a valid will, and was that will reviewed in the last 3 years? So, for instance, Entrepreneur Relief changed a year ago, one of the important reliefs you can avail of when you’re selling your business. But also, what’s called Capital Acquisitions Tax thresholds have increased in recent years also, where you can gift up to €400,000 now to a son or daughter. Those reliefs have changed. They used to be €335,000. So, it’s not the only reason, but one of the most important reasons to review your will, and we would suggest every 3 years, is to make sure that the decisions you made in your will, from a financial perspective, still make sense, that you’re happy with them and you haven’t tripped over a tax problem that might cost the beneficiary more than you would have wanted originally. So, do you have a valid will, and has it been reviewed in the last 3 years?

Do you have an Enduring Power of Attorney? This is a relatively new area for us. We’ve been recommending clients discuss this with their solicitors in the last 4 or 5 years. An Enduring Power of Attorney means that if, for a period of time, you’re impaired and can’t make a decision, you have assigned somebody who will help you. That’s both in terms of financial decisions that might need to be made, access to certain funds to pay certain medical costs if required. And, we’re certainly finding that it’s a prudent thing to have in your setup, so we have included it in the checklist. So, do you have an Enduring Power of Attorney.

Have you considered lifetime gifting and asset transfers? So, in terms of the questions we get from business owners about how to properly provide for their family, one of the additional benefits you get by having a financial plan, knowing what your personal asset target is, and knowing whether you’re on track or not, is that you can understand if you’re going to have a surplus or not.

And that helps with things like tax planning, but it also helps with helping you decide what you may want to do for your nearest and dearest when you’re alive. And it can help you decide whether lifetime gifting or transferring some of your assets to your next of kin is something that you’re in a position to do earlier in your life. We find that lifetime gifting and asset transfers are coming up more and more in recent years. Instead, particularly when it comes between parents and children. So, up to now, we couldn’t know if a son or daughter would have a tax bill, because typically, parents would be gifting an asset, ee didn’t know the value of the asset. The gift and the transfer of the asset would only happen when both parents had passed away at an arbitrary time in the future. We wouldn’t know the asset value when it’s transferred, and we also wouldn’t know the tax rules that apply.

So, in certain circumstances, it can make sense to gift or pass on assets to your next of kin. The ownership of that asset and any future increase in the value of that asset then is not subject to any estate taxes in the hands of your beneficiaries, and it’s an important thing to review, particularly after you’ve done your plan and you know if you’re going to have a surplus or not.

The final area in here, and you would expect it, the final of the four questions in this area, and you would expect it is:

Do you have adequate life insurance, and do you have adequate illness insurance?

So, these are really important. The reason you need life insurance and illness insurance, in addition to having them for peace of mind, if you know your target plan, if you know your financial independence number, your target personal asset level, if you know that, then the reason for having life and illness insurance is that, God forbid, if you’re not able to work to generate the assets that you need to hit that target, or God forbid, if you die prematurely, the insurance provides the funds that you would have had if you’d been able to continue to work. And also, in certain circumstances, life insurance can help you in terms of protecting and paying for some estate taxes and some Capital Acquisitions Tax that might be due to your family when you pass away. You can use life insurance for that.

Finally, in terms of asset transfers, we want to bring to your attention what’s called the annual gift exemption. You can gift up to €3,000 per year annually, or €6,000 from a couple, and we see this being used more and more, where parents want to give assets to their children, or grandparents want to give assets to their grandchildren. It seems like a small number, but €3,000 per individual, or €6,000 per couple can lead to a significant amount of money being passed over on a 10- and 15-year and longer basis. That’s the annual gift exemption.

So, we picked out one gem, one must-have question, and we’ll move on to that now:

Do you have a valid will, and have you reviewed that will in the last 3 years?

So, could you answer that first, please? Do you have a valid will, and have you reviewed your will within the last 3 years? Y or N, or yes or no, or whatever’s easiest for you? Thank you very much for that.

We’ll move on to the last two areas. We’ll move on to investing and exit planning, and we’re conscious of time. We know we’re coming up to half ten, so we’ll move on to questions in about 5 minutes.

But, the fourth area is:

How should I invest my money, and am I doing it right?

When it comes to investing, there’s a lot of uncertainty, and there’s a lot of emotion around this. From our experience, you’re in a strong position if you address the following, and we’ve included these four areas in our blueprint, or in our checklist for business owners.

Firstly is, do you know where your money is actually invested? Do you understand the returns that you’re getting, and how those returns both compare to the historical average, and also how those returns compare to the returns that you actually need to get the asset level that you need for your situation?

Are you investing in a tax-efficient way? And finally, do you remain disciplined through the inevitable temporary recessions and downturns we tend to get? Just the next slide there, Maria.

At a fairly simple level, there are 3 main places that you can and invest. And we’ll touch on this briefly. Equities, what you’re doing there is that you’re investing and owning thousands of the great companies of the world that you and me use every day without a second thought. Property, that’s residential or commercial buildings, purchased to generate rental income or capital appreciation. And finally, bonds, that’s debt or money that you can lend to a large business or to a government.

It’s worth mentioning that there are other asset classes that investors use, like commodities and gold and currencies, but these are the three main asset classes. And just to share with you, each of these classes through the years, in terms of where returns have come from, have behaved differently. So. if we just move on to the next slide there, Maria.

Between, 1926 and 2025, as long as we can get records going back, the yearly return from equities, the yearly return from investing in the great companies of the world has been 10.1% per annum. It’s almost never exactly 10 or 10.1% per annum, with returns yearly either much higher or much lower than this, but 10.1% per annum is the average yearly return to date. The return from bonds has averaged 4.8%. A reasonable measure of the return from property is by tracking returns on property investments called real estate investment trusts, or REITs, and they have average yearly returns of 6.5%, albeit there’s a much smaller choice of REITs to invest in, and they have a much shorter track record than equities and bonds, but 6.5% is the returns to date.

And you can see how these asset classes compared to putting money on deposit or putting money into cash, and from a long-term perspective, if you can have cash to cover the inevitable downturns we have, and then the balance of your funds can be put to work as prudently and as efficiently in equities, if you can capture as much of that 10.1% historical return as possible, you’ll go a long way towards having the investment returns that are going to help you with your personal targets.

We’ll just talk briefly about some of the mistakes that we’ve seen in investing. Maria, if you can go on to the next slide there. Which are 3 areas and 5 big mistakes.

In our experience, these are the biggest mistakes that we’ve seen in our 21 years. An over-reliance on bricks-and-mortar property investment, a lack of diversification. Property can be great, particularly if you can hold onto the property for 15 years plus, and if you don’t have big debt on it. But we’ve seen many examples of where property investment has been a disaster for investors. And relying on a relatively small number, 4 or 5 properties to provide all of the cash flow that your family needs is simply a risk not worth taking.

The second mistake that we’ve seen is not having a personal plan. So, reacting to events, or making investment decisions piecemeal, and not in a way that maximizes your chance of hitting your personal targets.

And finally, there’s 3 mistakes in here, which I’ve grouped under the heading of letting emotions rule your decisions. So, reacting to events is a big mistake that we see. Trying to pick recent winners, so just because a particular investment or stock or area is currently doing great, following the herd is generally speaking not a great strategy. Cryptocurrency in recent years is a good example of that. And the last one is the fear of missing out. So, the fear that you need to be, you need to be doing something.

The best investment strategies typically are relatively simple. They’re not that complicated. It’s not about having complicated products to get a return, or complicated products to be tax-efficient. They’re typically quite simple. Once you know the asset class you want to invest in, and you’re operating to a plan, and you have some emergency funds, and you’re able to invest for the long term, then picking the individual investment, picking where you put your money to work, is a relatively easy thing to do.

But it’s not always easy to follow during times of recession. So, these emotional mistakes that we’ve seen typically are at times when there’s a recession on, or a temporary decline, or when things are very heated and people are trying to grab ahold of short-term returns.

So, they’re the biggest mistakes that we’ve seen when it comes to investing. And just finally on investing, probably the biggest lesson we’ve learned is that managing your emotions is the biggest part of investing. So much about investing is behavioural and emotional. If you can keep investing on a regular basis, and you don’t react to events, and you can do so for 10 years or longer, if you did those 3 things, so you can invest for 10 years or longer, you add to your investments by regularly contributing and investing, you know, on a regular basis, and you don’t react, and you stick with your investment plan for 10 years or more. If you follow those three behavioural things, in the vast majority of cases, you will get a positive outcome.

But we always have to deal, when we’re in investment markets, with this thing that we call the wall of worry. So, there are no guarantees. Some uncertainty is unavoidable. If there was no uncertainty, investment returns would be predictable, and there’d be no difference between putting your money in the bank compared to investing it in equities or property. So, there is always a crisis of the day, and you’re never a minute away than reading a scary story on social media. But we have to have faith that the underlying returns, particularly from equity markets, when you can invest for 10 years or more, are almost always positive.

You must deal with the historical fact that one in every 5 years, or 2 to 3 years in every decade, you know, there will be a temporary fall in the value of your investments, and if you need to take your money out at that point, you will have a definite long-term fall. And we typically see falls of up to 15% at some stage in nearly every year. The last temporary declines, you know, we had COVID-19, we had a crypto exchange called FDX, we had some banks that failed in the US, we had a war in the Ukraine, and most recently, we had falls in markets that went on for a couple of months due to the US tariffs that were announced in the spring of 2025. So, there is always a bad news story around the corner, but if you endure the long-term averages, almost always go in your favour.

The gem of the question that we’re asking you in terms of investing is:

Do you know how your returns compare to the historical average, and what returns you need to achieve?

Can you put in Y, N, or S [Somewhat]? Only a couple more questions to go, guys. Thank you, folks.

The final area I’m going to, cover is exit planning.

And, from our experience, the three things that matter most when it comes to business owners planning the exit from their business is as follows:

Can my business operate without me?

Have I a Corporate Adviser to support my exit planning?

And do I actually have an exit plan if I’m hoping to exit in the next 3 to 5 years?

Most business owners will have an accountant, the vast majority will have an accountant, and possibly they’ll also have, in many situations, a tax advisor, but very few will have a corporate advisor. If we just move on to the next slide there, Maria, a Corporate Adviser is somebody that isn’t a broker who might sell your business. It’s somebody who should be able to help you value your business and has experience of your industry, be able to properly help you to assess whether your business is actually sellable or not. Help you to identify the risks and the blocks to a sale, and actually help you prepare properly for a sale or exit. And that preparation is absolutely critical. Ideally, at least 3 to 5 years before you plan to exit your Corporate Adviser will do what’s called evaluation on the business.

The most used accounting term, accounting equation to put a value on your business is a thing called EBITDA. And, EBITDA stands for Earnings Before Interest, Tax, Depreciation, and amortization. But effectively, it’s trying to calculate an ongoing value from your business when you exit it.

You can also, when your business is valued, you can also have different multiples. So once you get a particular amount of earnings that the business should be generated. That’ll be a yearly number that the business should be able to generate on a continuing basis when you exit. And that yearly number is multiplied with a multiple to come up with what the value is. And the multiple can vary wildly. It’ll depend on your sector, it’ll depend on the business’s dependence on you, it’ll depend on how concentrated you are on a small number of customers, and it’ll depend on what conditions are like at that time in the industry.

Just, the key thing here is planning. And in terms of developing your exit strategy, I would just point out 3 things from this slide. Plan early, think 5 years. Try to reduce the dependency on yourself in the business, and work with a Corporate Adviser who will help you to identify what the issues actually are that buyers will, that buyers will want addressed.

So, just, the final area here was exit planning, and our final gem of a question we’re going to ask you is:

Do you have a Corporate Adviser to support your exit planning?

In the Q&A, if you can give us a Y or N for that, folks.

Folks, just a quick recap. Okay, and I know, when you’re trying to distill five areas down into one, you can get a lot of information thrown at you. But just as a recap, we’ve shared with you the 5 main areas that we believe are vital for business owners to get a handle on and to address if they want to make sure that their base is covered from a personal finance perspective.

You’ve shared with us some answers to, one question in each of those five areas, and hopefully now it’s a start to helping you understand where you are and what you might need to do in your particular situation.

We are going to deal with the questions you put in originally, and I know we got a couple of questions in advance, so we will do that. But just most importantly, the last step before we deal with questions is this.

So, everybody who registers and every attendee today gets a complimentary Take Action meeting in July or August. And our commitment to you, as we said at the start, is that, based on what you’ve heard today, and we’ll give you a full copy of your financial success blueprint with the five areas. But our commitment for you, when we have a Take Action meeting, is that we will help you fix at least one of the financial areas you may need to get addressed in your situation. So, just for 30 seconds there, guys, we’ll give you a choice. Maria, I think you have a choice here. You can book your July or August Take Action meeting now. You can click on the Calendly link that Maria has put into the chat or if you don’t want to fiddle around with online calendars, you can simply email me directly, enda@iqf.ie, and just put the word ‘webinar’ in the subject, you don’t have to do anything else, so if that’s easiest for you, and we’ll do the rest after that. So I’ll just give you a few seconds,

For those who want to do that. The Calendly link is in the chat, Maria, is that correct?

Maria Devine: Yes, it’s in the chat now.

Enda Brady: Thank you, or if it’s faster and easier for you, you can just email me and stick webinar in the subject. We’ll just give that a few seconds, Maria, and then we’ll deal with the questions.

Okay, guys, if you have taken the opportunity to, to have a conversation now, to get part of your situation sorted, we really appreciate that.

We should, if you just go on to the very last slide there, Maria, we are going to send you what we’ve covered today. They’re the five areas in the Financial Success Blueprint, or the Financial Success Checklist for Business Owners, and we are going to send you a copy of that after the webinar, so that you have them all in the one place. That’s a summary of the areas we’ve touched on today. So, just in terms of questions, Maria, what, what kind of questions did we get? I’ll take a pause there.

Maria Devine: Okay, so we had a couple earlier on that were just wanting to clarify something about the Entrepreneur Relief. One was, what is the rate that’s applied to the first €1.5 million? And the second was clarifying if a couple were selling a business, they could sell for €3 million with 90% tax-free?

Enda Brady: Yes, the Entrepreneur Relief, is a personal lifetime limit, so, a couple can avail of it is the first answer, yes, and they could avail up to €3 million then, yes. The first 90% up to €1.5 million is available under Entrepreneur Relief, so you would pay a 10% tax rate on that, or €150,000. And the other €1.35 million would be available to you.

The key thing here, and we would always refer to a tax advisor, the key thing here is that you, you are one of the businesses that qualifies to use Entrepreneur Relief in the first place. So, the anti-avoidance measures in relation to Entrepreneur Relief, and there’s anti-avoidance measures in relation to the other main Capital Gains Tax relief, which is Retirement Relief, they’re about, ensuring that people who are working full-time in their business, and they’re of a certain age, can be given this relief. But, on the first €1.5 million, you pay 10%, which is €150,000, and yes, these are personal lifetime reliefs, so you a couple can use them. Assuming that couple both qualify as owners of the business who can use this relief based on the role they have in the business, their age, and their length of service.

Maria Devine: That’s great, thank you. And another question was, the Dow and the S&P are at record highs, and they say timing is everything. Is now a time to step back and wait?

Enda Brady: No is the answer. Two quick things I’ll say here is that, timing the market, we mentioned briefly, that timing the market or reacting to events is one of the mistakes that we see. If you have a 10-year investment timeframe, and we think most people up until their late 70s have a 10-year investment time frame, the best time to invest in equities, the best time to buy, to buy into the stock market, and remember, you’re buying businesses that produce products and services that you use every day of the week. The best time to do that is yesterday, and the second-best time to do that is today.

So, timing the market is something that people cannot do consistently well, and the research on it shows that investment performance, when you try to time getting in and out of markets, the investment performance has been disastrous. There are too many variables. You’ll have to know when to sell, you’ll have to know when to buy again, and you’ll have to do it so that the implementation costs of buying and selling and the taxes make sense for you to get a better long-term return.

We have full conviction that if you know what your target is, if you keep emergency funds for the inevitable downturns, and a downturn could last 18 months or 2 years, but if you keep emergency cash for the inevitable downturns, putting the rest of your available funds to work in equities, and I would caution to say not one or two stocks, but hundreds and thousands of equities. And doing so on a 10-year basis, you’re maximizing your chances of getting positive returns to get you the assets you need, and to beat inflation over that period.

Maria Devine: Okay, the next question, what is the most tax-efficient way to provide for retirement for a company director of a limited company in his early 50s who’s exploring options?

Enda Brady: So, if you’re a company owner in your early 50s, so we’re going to send you these slides tomorrow, but under tax efficiency, we said two things, so we need to figure out, some minimum targets for you in terms of your financial independence number and the asset level we should build up for you. But certainly, we’ll be making sure, when you’re in your early 50s and you’re planning, we’ll be making sure that your salary is at an appropriate level. In most cases, for every thousand euro of salary, you can put at least a matching thousand euros into your pension. So, level one, we look at what salary you could take from the business, make sure your PRSI contributions are maximized, and look at the pension you can fund.

And then, separately, we look at the individual type of business you have. And potentially, where required, work with a separate Corporate Adviser to see, do you have an option of potentially selling the business in future years. And if not, certainly by the time you get to 55, do a review of your situation to make sure that you’ve maximized your ability to extract money using the Capital Gains Tax reliefs when you sell your business. So, I would go through the Level 1 and Level 2 tax tips that we gave you in this webinar, and happy to discuss that with you in more detail. But your salary and pension contributions over the next few years will be the foundation of preparing for your retirement. And then after that, looking at your business to see the most appropriate way to sell it, or liquidate it, and get you some tax-free funds out using the Capital Gains Tax reliefs available to every business owner.

But if you send an email to enda@iqf.ie and you put the word webinar in it, happy to give you some time to give you the specific guidance in your situation around that, yeah, if you’re in your early 50s. But it’s the time to do it.

Maria Devine: That’s great. Another question, what is the best way to protect your pension pot if you are retiring during a global economic downturn?

Enda Brady: Have emergency cash to cover at least 3 years of your lifestyle expenses, and have it planned in advance that you would be accumulating that money, so that the time you wanted to exit your business and the time you wanted to, stop earning an income, that you had that emergency cash there to allow you to actually do it.

Typically, there’s 3 bad years in 10, or your funds, if you’re invested in equity, might go down by 15% in every year. So, part of our investment philosophy is to make sure our clients build up appropriate, appropriate emergency cash. So, if we’re all unlucky enough that the time that we want to retire is a year like 2008 or 9, we have to remember that we haven’t had a recession that’s lasted longer than 12 months, we haven’t had a really bad economic climate in Ireland in 15 years. And I’m not trying to scare you to say that one’s, you know, just about to happen, but we always have to plan for what we don’t know, and the best way to give yourself a safety net, and the best way to protect your pension assets is have emergency cash to cover at least 3 years of your lifestyle expenses, and put the rest of it to work in equities.

Maria Devine: That’s great. And the final question which Michael sent in beforehand was, is selling his 100% owned business the fastest way for a 51-year-old man to accumulate a pension pot if no pension is in place?

Enda Brady: Probably, Michael. Thank you for the question. So, if you’re just starting, or there’s no pension there, there’s a couple of questions important there in advance. You know, we’ll have to first see if your business is sellable, but if somebody’s making an approach to you and you’re looking at options, if a 6 or 7 figure, or if a large sum can come in from the sale of your business, once you figure out the amount of personal assets you need, that might do all the work for you, and we need to get proper tax advice to make sure you get it all tax-efficiently.

If you’re lucky enough to get an offer, we’d have to look at that offer closely to see if it’s going to provide you with the personal assets you need. There’s a lot of moving parts when it comes to valuing a business or deciding if somebody can actually buy your business, and it changes depending on what’s going on in your particular industry. So as much as possible, we advise our clients not to rely on the future sale of their business, or not to rely on getting a lot of money out when they liquidate their business under capital against tax rules, because the tax rules change.

You know, our lead position and our anchor position is, let’s get the money out of the business through salary and as generous a pension contribution as you can handle. That takes the money out of the business, it puts it in a very tax-efficient investment. It puts it in your personal name, and you have it there to spend on your own personal cash flow, or to give to your estate if, God forbid, you die prematurely. So, we tried to do as much of the heavy lifting, if not all the heavy lifting, through salary and pension, so that we’re not dependent in an unhelpful way on having to sell the business.

Maria Devine: That’s great, that’s the end of the questions.

Enda Brady: Folks, thanks a million. Just a final word, we might have bitten off more than we can chew. We try to keep the sessions to 30 minutes plus time for questions and answers. I think I was going on for 45 minutes plus questions and answers. So, thanks a million for sticking with it.

We’re going to look at all your answers to the questions in the Q&A, and we’re going to follow up with you.

We really appreciate you staying on, we really appreciate your time today, and particularly we appreciate the engagement you give and the answers you gave to our questions in the Q&A. We really appreciate it. We’d love any other feedback you have about the event. For those who want to take action now, we’re looking forward to speaking with you in July and August.

And at any point in the coming days, or at any point at all, if you want to contact us, there’s a standing offer there to give you a Take Action meeting in July and August.

So, please take up that offer if you haven’t done so already. We have two more webinars planned for this year, and we’ll be communicating them to you also. Thanks a million again, and goodbye.