So the VAT rate has been reduced from 17.5% to 15% for 13 months. This means an item selling for £9.99 will be reduced by 21p. That does not get me excited enough to go running out to the shops to buy anything.Fortunately, most property investors are not registered for VAT but the sudden change in tax rate has been interesting. Over the past two years, I have bought many different programmes to manage our property portfolio. Some have been online and some offline. Now the messages are coming in telling me how to implement this tax change. I have to do nothing, or maybe a click or two, to the online software as it is all done for me. The offline ones are so different. One set of instructions is two pages long and another is pushing its support package! Crickey! (more…)