Enjoy Christmas - but don't forget your tax return

It's that taxing time of year: self-assessment tax returns must be filed with the taxman by 31 January. Leave it any later and you'll be fined. Tim Bennett walks you through what records you'll need, and gives some top tips to help smooth the whole rather tedious process.

As a rule of thumb, once the Christmas Day lunch conversation strays onto politics, sex or religion, you can kiss familial harmony goodbye.

But I think we can add a fourth topic to that list. Unless your family is populated with Her Majesty's Revenue & Customs (HMRC) inspectors, or a festive game of Scrabble turns it up as a killer 'triple word' opportunity, 'tax' is also guaranteed to kill seasonal good cheer.

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Tim graduated with a history degree from Cambridge University in 1989 and, after a year of travelling, joined the financial services firm Ernst and Young in 1990, qualifying as a chartered accountant in 1994.

He then moved into financial markets training, designing and running a variety of courses at graduate level and beyond for a range of organisations including the Securities and Investment Institute and UBS. He joined MoneyWeek in 2007.