Cycle Scheme

plot fail...he would need to pay you so that the bicycle would actually get paid for, out of your wages in 10 monthly installments before tax + NI. but you could slip him a cash bung of the mimimum monthly payment, every month and he could pay you the minimum to cover the monthly bike payment. that would be well dodgy but is probably legal.

you could have waited until i got the pics dude.

i did it too...piece of cake.

plus you don't need to buy a full bike. you can take your £1k voucher to blb or 14 and just buy a frame. bear in mind they will charge you 10% for cashing your £1k voucher...i.e. £100

Whaaart? 10% on top of their margin? Thats a load of shit.

Im thinking of getting them to order me a Cinelli Supercorsa Pista frame which will never see a track in its life...

that's the price you pay for breaking the RULES

No,

That's the price if you get caught breaking the rules.

What rules? I dont get it...

Is this not an example of a bicycle store applying an exhorbitant administration fee for the privilege of spending your money in their store?

i did it too...piece of cake.

plus you don't need to buy a full bike. you can take your £1k voucher to blb or 14 and just buy a frame. bear in mind they will charge you 10% for cashing your £1k voucher...i.e. £100

you don't use a voucher.
there's absolutely no need to use cyclescheme.
there's no 10% deducted at all.

it's not hard and Velorution have the procedure you can follow detailed here: http://www.velorution.biz/?page_id=1306
you buy the bike as you buy ANY business item.

What rules? I dont get it...

Is this not an example of a bicycle store applying an exhorbitant administration fee for the privilege of spending your money in their store?

Some places will ignore the 10% if buy all your gubbins from them.

What rules? I dont get it...

Is this not an example of a bicycle store applying an exhorbitant administration fee for the privilege of spending your money in their store?

no, it's the cyclescheme cut cause you've used their scheme to get your voucher, it's how they pay for it.

as I've said - if you have your own Limited Company there is NO NEED AT ALL to use a voucher for buying a bike on cyclescheme.

So you just bung it through as a deduction?

So you just bung it through as a deduction?

read the velorution URL :)

you buy the bike with company funds just as you buy anything. you get the paperwork etc for your records.

the magic words then for how you buy it from your company are : 'salary sacrifice' - the same scheme that was used for buying computers etc a few years ago. (Why reinvent the wheel?) s

at the end of the scheme you need 1 more page for your records and you are done. You choose how long you run the scheme for (doesn't have to be 12 months) and you MUST earn more than the minimum wage to be eligible.

That's all there is to it. If you still need help then I can point you at someone who has done it for me. It'll cost less than 10% ;)

Yeah, righto... I'll get some bean counter type to do it for me.

Cheers for the info dudes!

I'm speccing up a bike on Ribble now, and I've got a simple little spreadsheet to work out what my monthly payment would be. Ribble want £65 for doing Cyclescheme, so that's fixed, and I'm figuring;

((total cost of bike)/12)*0.7 = monthly payment

If I'm earning 15k-ish, does that sound about right? The savings aren't as big as I expected...

My spec comes out as £925, and I'm looking at paying around £720. Then there's the "nominal fee" at the end, which I have no idea of what to expect. I guess the main advantage is that I get to pay it over a year.

You won't be paying tax on your payment, taken from salary before deductions.

Atleast you get cyclescheme, sobs.

That seems low. Remember to subtract VAT before taking it off your gross. (including NI) You should be saving 35-45%. There's a calculator on the cyclescheme website.

Fucking academic short contracts :-( The thing I'm most jealous of all you CSers for is the monthly installments. I've been saving up for a new road bike forever but at the end of each month I end up spending what I've put aside on food and shit.

Fucking academic short contracts :-( The thing I'm most jealous of all you CSers for is the monthly installments. I've been saving up for a new road bike forever but at the end of each month I end up spending what I've put aside on food and shit.

Surely if you eat enough food, shit should be free? Provided you have a good capture / storage method.

pulls face

A lot of the supposed benefits of CS depend on how rigidly each company interprets it. At my old place they initially tried to make everyone buy the same model/brand of bike, so that they could pool them for sale to any employee at the end of the year, which obviously didn't go down well.

You save a lot more if you are a higher rate taxpayer as far as I recall from playing with the online calculator.

Well, I'm CERTAINLY not a higher-rate taxpayer...

As far as I could see because you pay for the bike before you pay tax the benefit to you increased with the amount of tax you pay, therefore if you pay 40% tax you save a lot more.

I am aware that this information is not that useful.

which makes no sense really,

I'm trying to decide whether or not to do it. I would love a shiny new road bike, but I should be saving at the moment - not easy on a crap wage. Just wanted to work out the monthly figure to help the decision. I think it will be worth it.

The benefit for 40% tax payers is really perverse given the schemes aims.

The final payment arrangements have to be very deliberately vague to keep HMCRE mitts off the scheme.

Has to be kept as a hire/rental scheme only with the disposal of the bike after the rental period kept as a separate and completely unconnected transaction. I understand you can usually just pay a 13th monthly payment to buy the bike but again might depend on whether its an external scheme or a company's own one.

"If proof were needed that the bicycle industry is thriving during the recession, it’s been confirmed by the news that Bath-based Cyclescheme has been named the fastest-growing private company in Britain in this year’s Fast Track 100 league table, published in The Sunday Times. in Britain in this year’s Fast Track 100 league table, published in The Sunday Times. The prestigious accolade reflects the company’s phenomenal growth, which has seen sales rocket by 348% a year from an annualised £253,000 in 2006 to £22.7m in 2009. £22.7m in 2009"

Fuck me that's a lot of 10%'s. How the fuck they got this past government is beyond me...must of involved compromising photos. Don't think this loophole will last much longer...rinse it while you can and do anything you can to avoid 10%!