lets have a tax credit rant thread

[maighdlin]

as it is the joyful new tax credit year i thought i would start a thread for people to rant on.

our tax credits have gone down to £33pw when according to HMRC calculator it should be £68pw. i received no letter from them informing me of this cut. i phoned them and they are using an estimate of our income based on the assumption that i would have been working full time since having DD, not true was made redundant. They said i can't get it fixed until i receive my renewal pack and i may not receive it until 30 june. GREAT!! DH earns just over 15k we pay 660pm for mortgage and rates. i'm a full time student but most of my money goes on child care. can't get a job as most jobs that i could do are min wage and they would have to pay me more than a 16 year old so 16 year old probably gets job. I feel like banging my head against the wall. even more money worries!!

feel free to vent about tax credits below. overpayments, underpayments, their general unhelpfulness...

we lose our tax credits because of DH's company car which again he has to have as part of his job and gets taxed on and pays for fuel !!! ... but it is classed as an income at a ridicolous amount ...just try not to think how much better we would be if he went in and asked for a paycut!!
... think there will be a lot of people asking for paycuts soon especially when they cut child benefit next year for higher rate tax earners ... saves the companies and the workers money in the long run but cuts the ££ being paid in tax to fund the tax credits and child benefit too .. so who should pay for who?

I also think maintenance should be classed as income for tax credits , because that is what it is... an income to that household.

rant over !!

I think we just got the childcare portion then

anyway, we no longer get it

hey-ho

and has just cost me 70 quid to fill the car up (even with 6p a litre knocked off at Morrisons where my food bill has gone up by about a third < sigh >)

TAX CREDIT reductions are obviously a live issue. It needs well publicising

I dont think the Coalition have looked up the word FAIRNESS on the Downing Street computer (The Tories were given eleven million quid by the City types in London)

Ive just rang them to update them with my expected earnings for this year - and Im pretty sure im now over whatever "upper limit" there is and I wont qualify for any tax credit on the child care element now :( Im not a higher rate tax payer...but I think just over the threshold (which for some reason th guy on the phone either couldnt or wouldnt tell me what it was?!). I will wait to receive their letter...

Good luck, UK

My tax credits were down 50 pound this month and will go down again next month as dd gets childcare vouchers from this month. No notification think they are just estimating incomes until renewal packs come out.
It just seems we are being squeezed from every angle and there is nothing left to squeeze anymore.

I get ctc as I'm ds3 full time carer

quite few years ago when ds1 and ds2 dad walked out ctc did not exist but I got Is for me and both the boys .I then worked so of Is got married had 2 more dc and yes we got some help due to low wages but not a lot

ff a bit marriage broke down xh could not cope with ds3 having sn and I found myself as a single parent and ds3 full time carer .Which I recieve £54 a week for .I get ctc (makes up what we live on) and I get IS of £24 a week as the carers is classed as a wage

yet I still get called lazy benefits scrounger even though in govementd eyes I'm working

so if ctc goes they will then have to go back to paying Is for myself and the children instead of just for me

mind you want a not fair moment if I'm in hospital much longer I lose the Is and my Hb despite the fact my mums had to move into mine to look after the kids and cut her hrs to be there while my stepdad stays living in their house to care for his elderley mum oh and hold down f/t job .

So I could face coming out of hospital to no home and potenially staying with my mum/stepdad his mum,myself and 4 kids in a 2 bed house bearing in mind ds3 can't climb stairs and right now I can't either

Having a car as a employment benefit is a benefit in kind, is put on your P11d and forms part of your taxable income - and is therefore treated as taxable income for tax credit purposes, as are any other benefits in kind.
Company cars ARE expensive (in terms of tax) and it may be worthwhile looking at whether his employer would offer a monthly cash payment (which would be taxable and be part of your income) instead of a car - he would then need to fund his own car.

With vans there are circumstances where the provision of a van is not a benefit in kind and therefore not counted.

Huge numbers of people turn down company cars these days. You need to look into whether they are worthile having. One of our cars cost £800 cash to buy and hasn't broken down once in about 3 years. It isnt' always cheapest to take a car provided by an employer.

omg dont even get me started on the fucking hmrc, we have had our tax credits cut to £10 a fricken week with no warning whatsoever beforehand. We're losing hundreds of pounds a month. To be fair we have been more than happy with the help they've given us since DD was born but that twit david cameron is screwing us over big time. I hope everyone who voted for him is bloody happy.

Do remember that Labour also proposed 20% cuts and that the Coaltion has moved the amount you can earn totally free of tax up much higher . It's now £7,475. That is arguably better than the complications and difficulties of tax credits with their massive admin costs and constant mistakes. We never used to have them at all and most people managed without them.

since when has money from the state become a right? rather than a bonus?

bowlingball Mon 18-Apr-11 17:55:11
since when has money from the state become a right? rather than a bonus?

since wages failed to keep up with the basic cost of living

missy exactly .

Perhaps if the govt didn't give out so much in tax credits/housing benefit etc, then the cost of living wouldn't have risen so much in the first place!

Giving out tax credits to households earning up to £58k doesn't make any sense. The average household income is £35k, so many of these people earn more than the average. 35% of benefits go to those on above average incomes. It pushes up the cost of housing, childcare, etc etc. Clearly theses people don't need that money.

It's even more ludicrous when you think we tax the household with one hand and then give it back with another, minus of course a big fat paycheck for all the admininstrators in between.

Employers need to pay a living wage ...as long as employers know the Government will pay out ...well,where is the incentive ?

Xenia
the increased personal allowance is worth £16 per month. So £32 for a couple. Hardly the same as the very real loss in childcare payments, which for poorest working families is about £20 a week.

My happy happy joy joy story is the letter I just opened from tax credits which says I'll be getting £10 a week from this week. I was like until I remembered that I called up on friday re childcare and they said they had stopped one nursery from 9/4 for no reason at all. So they have £42 instead of £140 on their system.

Thankfully she added it back on friday so my payments might be correct this week. But if I hadn't happen to call last week I'd be living on £10 for the week (and I drive 100 miles a week for my job, leaving aside the commute)

I wish we weren't reliant on the state, with one working f/t professional parent and one working p/t parent we should be able to manage to feed and cloth ourselves but we can't!

'since when has money from the state become a right? rather than a bonus?'

Since most of us spent a few decades paying in in the belief that should it go tits up there's a welfare state to rely on, and then they moved some of those benefits (IS for chidlren, Family Credit- don't think WTC sprung up from nowhere: Family Credit existed beforehand and ended when TCs came in). Tits up, IMO, includes housing and other absics rising beyond the affordable with a simultaneous massive shortage of social housing.

People think WTC is just a tax rebate and it ws once. but- presumably as part of some sensibly cost cutting moce (bet it failed though)- it ended up absorbing other benefits that ahd long been in existence. It's a very different ebast to what it was at inception.

But hardly anyone got the predecessor credits. The current ones went to too many people. We need massive simplification,.

(Not that I've ever been entitled to any of these things)

Xenia but how could it be done ? :)

I just don't know how many of us will survive without the type of 'top-ups' in place right now ?

Jobs do not pay enough ...IMO

Even if one plans for children ,expenses ETC ...sometimes life happens and you have to take low paid work ~much lower ...

We are still left with expenses that once were easy to cover before 'life'

Do you think it could work on a 'refund' type basis (like they have here in the US ?) NO Government ass ,just a refund (if you work )at the end of the year ?

Perhaps Xenia, what I am saying though is that a system needs to be put into palce for tehse if the TCs end- I have ahorrid feeling that they will end without that happening (and lots of low icnome famillies got family credits, even if they didn't tell you- not us, but plenty of people, working famillies, that I was friednly with back home).

have been out all day with DD having a fun free day to cheer myself up after this morning.

i hate how we are so dependant on TCs. DH is terrified to leave his job if there was a job with more money as the economy is so shite his job is at least secure, or at least will have a decent redundancy as he has been there for so long. I know being a student can be seen to some people as a "choice" that i made, but i for one think it was a good choice to make in the longterm. I will be able to do a job i have always wanted to do which will be good for society and hopefully earn enough money that i will be in a position to NOT be dependant on TCs. i think if i pursue my career i will put the money back in as well as other benefits. ( i want to be a prosecutor for the PPS, NI's CPS) I know im upset about our tax credits being cut more because i feel so helpless relying on them than i am about the actual loss of money, corners can always be cut, crap can always be found to sell on ebay etc. when i was younger i always imagined i would be at least comfortably well off when i had a child, not in the position i am where the loss of £30 a week has me in floods of tears, but that's the hand i have been dealt.

the thing about TC's which i think annoy most people is the sheer inefficiency of it. i would hope that most people who get TCs are thankful for them but when face with such a shite system of course we are going to complain. things are made so complicated and you are more often than not when you phone for help are met with someone who clearly couldn't give less than a shit.

I am sure i speak for most TC claimers that we would much rather have earned that £x per week but salaries have barely gone up whilst the cost of living has sky rocketed. whilst the government is picking up the tab for greedy employers then there will always be people who have to depend on them. I remember reading something that for a single person in the uk to live a decent life, not an extravagant life just more than beans on toast in a bedsit, they need something like 1700pm. many people supporting families won't earn that. it seems to me like the gap between rich and poor is becoming wider.

The state for many decades has recognised that it is expensive bringing up children and that it is not an indulgent hobby we engage in like keeping a racehorse but has some advantage in terms fo producing children who will pay the pensions of the old in due course.

So about 40+ years ago there was a tax allowance against your tax if you had a child . That was changed I think in my life time when the family allowance and then child benefit came in - which was importantly money to the lower earner usually the mother in those very sexist days - nowadays plenty of women earn double or even 10x what their husbands do in my case) Child benefit worked well because it was a universal benefit, no complications in working out who was entitled. Taht's why I also favour a universal payment to all adults regardless of need so that the idle who never work, those who want work and can't get it and those in work are all being paid the same sum per week.

However where are now is a very complicated system. I have been very lucky that I have usually been able to find ways to earn more money when we've needed it. Not everyone can. Sometimes it involves moving. Sometimes it involves working all night or twice as hard as some others. It often requires quite a bit of lateral thinking. So someone about to lose say £30 a week is there not some way to earn £30 a week extra. It's what I earn in about 10 minutes and I'm nothing special. I have lots of children around graduation age and I know jobs even in pubs are not to be had but surely it's worth spending say an hour a day on sites like peopleperhour bidding for work or leaflets through doors offering to do things like clean windows or clear drives or all the various things people market that way. SOme people manage to generate work in that fashion.

Almost makes me glad I've never had TCs. What you've never had you never miss.

Many can Xenia, of course they can. But the very most vulnerable simply cannot. And that si whats scary I guess. As you know we've been slogging for eyars to escape this; reckon we've put in our hours. I even got an A in my MA essay i found out yesterday. Except yet again a child has been referred for asd assessment 9that'll make 3 asd and one other SEN) so we are right abck at the start.

And it can;t just be me peddling so fast and failing to keep up.