I have £40K of shares – is there a quick way to cash in while avoiding capital gains tax and fees?

I have £40,000 worth of shares and want know the best and quickest way of getting these shares into cash whilst avoiding Capital Gains Tax (CGT) or any other tax. 

The shares are all in Old Mutual that are held at my broker Barclays, this tax year I have already use my tax-free allowance and sold shares to £10,600.

Is there a way of the money out quicker other than waiting for each tax year to arrive and take the maximum allowance out?

This will take another three or four years, which isn’t ideal as I would like to buy a house and get married to my fiancé hopefully next year.

Some people have mentioned transferring some of my shares into a stock Isa and then closing the Isa out, but I’m not sure how you transfer the shares and want to be 100 per cent sure that I won’t get hit with a tax bill in a years’ time.

With the tax year end approaching I don’t really want to miss out. A.C, London.

Tax help: Is there any way to cash out shares and avoid CGT?

Lee Boyce of This is Money, replies: This question is rather topical as this morning George Osborne faced fresh calls to slash CGT, after a report showed increases have failed to create revenue.
Official figures examined by the Adam Smith Institute revealed that putting up the tax in 2010 has actually cost the Treasury income.
Its report finds people held on to assets rather than selling them, to avoid the higher tax rate.
Osborne raised CGT from 18 per cent to 28 per cent for most taxpayers in June 2010, nearly three months into the tax year. This unusual timing means the impact of the change can be easily measured.
Figures from HM Revenue & Customs show a 76 per cent drop in transactions that attract CGT, and a 64 per cent reduction in tax paid.
If the new regime had run for a full year the amount raised by the levy would have plunged from £6.9billion to £2.5billion. So what can you do in your circumstances? I asked a tax expert. 

Tim Gregory, partner in the Private Wealth team at Saffery Champness Chartered Accountants, says: The CGT exemption is often misunderstood.
Shares that are already in an Isa portfolio are exempt from CGT.  Unfortunately, the only shares you can transfer into an Isa are ones you have from an employee share scheme. 
In all other cases, the shares must be bought from the market by the Isa manager.
It seems that you have sold £10,600 worth of shares during the course of this tax year so far. 
The limit relates to the amount of capital gain that is exempt, and so you will usually be able to sell shares worth much more than the limit and still have no CGT to pay.
For example, your Old Mutual shares are currently worth £40,000, and the current trading price of these shares is a little under 200p. 
You do not say how much you paid for them, but the price has seldom been under 100p in the last 10 years. 
Unless you bought all the shares at the bottom of the market, or a very long time ago, this means that the maximum capital gain you could have is £20,000.  The actual gain may be much less than this, depending on the cost price.
If your sales of shares during this tax year so far gave capital gains of much less than £10,600, then it is possible that you could sell a lot of your Old Mutual shares this side of 5 April, and then sell almost all the rest after 5 April without having CGT to pay for either tax year.
If you cannot sell all of them this way without some CGT, then you might want to hold the remainder until after you get married. 
You can then transfer them to your spouse and your spouse can then sell them, using their own CGT exemption. 
A transfer to your spouse is free of CGT and the spouse takes on a cost price equal to what you paid originally. 
This effectively lets the spouse stand in your shoes with regard to the shares concerned, but able to use their own CGT exemption.
In this way, you can get most of the value out of the shares by early April, rather than waiting the three or four years that you were anticipating. 
You might have to wait until you get married for the rest, but that could be an extra wedding present for you both.