to be pissed off that DH has had a bonus cos tax credits will take loads of money off us

[FuckingTaxCredits]

have nc doubt the dm readers will be out in force for this one

dh has had an annual bonus of 2700

which should be awesome news but I nearly cried when dh told me

as this happened a few years ago as well, and i know that when I do our tax credits renewal they will end up royally screwing me up the ass and taking loads off us. even though dh will prob come out with 2k, max, of his bonus, if he is lucky, but tax credits will take the whole amount off us

so it will hit ME in MY pocket cos dh is doing well at work

bonuses should be just that, a FUCKING BONUS

so pissed off

Gamer it does tally that chart is without working tax, childcare comes under the working tax category.

YABU - you should be aiming to earn enough as a family not to rely on the benefits safety net. I'm not a DM reader BTW, I'm a fairly lefty Guardian reader who works, pays taxes and believes in the welfare system, as a safety net. People working dropping hours to stay under thresholds or complaining about bonuses just annoys and frustrates me...

Guineapig, I see you don't live in a country where people get zero-hours contracts, or where carers for the disabled, sick and elderly get paid minimum wage for 15 minutes, then nothing for the fifteen minutes it takes to get to the next client, then another 15 minutes of minimum wage, followed by another 15 minutes of nothing.

I get where you are coming from, when I was a working single mum, when I got a pay rise I was never actually any better off because the more I earned the less help I received. Not being greedy. But when you work hard it would be nice to feel as though it was worth it!
Now I am happily married but we are entitled to tax credits now I over estimate the next year (as my hubby sometimes has overtime) this way when it is time to do the renewel hopefully we earned under the guesstimated amount and we won't end up owing tax credits. Might be helpful in future to over estimate the following year so you won't have to pay tax credits back??

Brian, do you mean you think an income of 40k is bad?

who are you, the secret millionaire?

I think brain was saying £40k is not low paid, therefore shouldn't need benefits

Guinea is it just dropping under benefits thresholds that annoys you or any? Would you not be irritated if you slipped over a threshold and lost all your increase? I am ft at over £60k, looking to go part time, I definitely want to be a basic rate taxpayer, as not only does any pound after that get reduced to 41p after tax, Ni, pension and student loan, but my childcare vouchers are taxed too. Meanwhile my pension has staggered bands which rise by 2% at 46k, so if I calculate my hours wrong and get paid £1 too much I will have to pay an extra £900 in pension contributions ( it is a defined benefit pension so I wouldn't get more out as a result). Meantime I am paying £130 a day for childcare and £25 to commute, so yes, I choose to drop below the thresholds and maximise my return for the time I spend away from my kids. Is that ok since I don't get any benefits?

ssd and bedraggled; I'm not a millionaire, but 40k amounts to about 3.3k per month? After tax, NI, pension, etc that probably goes down to about 1.3k? Is this not enough to live on nowadays? Rent is what, 50% of that? So 500 quid for food, clothes etc... Actually when I think about it, it sounds very low... Maybe a subject for another thread, but what would be a truly "minimum" family income, for say, 2 or 3 kids?

40k after Tax and NI is 2.5k a month. Even after everything is taken off on 40k DH would take home 2.3k. Obviously pension contributions vary but I would think take home would be more than 1.3k.

Ah - Ok, thanks GSR - NL taxes are a lot higher than UK ones then.... So, I guess my question remains; is 40K a year enough to live on without govt help?

i dont know how it is now, but it used to be that for a family, couple of kids, 40k no govt help (after tax)was about the same per month as 20k plus govt benefits (no tax paid on govt benefits), so there wasnt much difference in take home pay

"NL taxes are a lot higher than UK ones "

Don't understand that.

Do you mean Netherlands (Holland)?

I thought it meant Income Tax + National Insurance

Sorry PJ - yes I meant that taxes seem a lot higher here in the Netherlands.. Apologies for confusion...

What is income tax there?

Do you pay an equivalent to NI separately, or is it bundled together?

NI here is a bit complicated, with upper and lower limits and variable rates but employee pays about 12% and employer pays about 14% on gross taxable earnings (it is not paid on savings or investment income). It would be far more sensible to bundle it into income tax, but that would make the govt look bad because people would say tax rates had gone up.

It would be much more transparent to have income tax and NI as one deduction, but the process of combining them would doubtless take years and much expenditure, as there are different thresholds and different allowances.

It would be lot simpler to merge them at say a flat rate for everyone of 33.3% which basic rate tax plus NI or just about and could mean we charge that on other income too like rentals and pension income which would be fairer all round and we could start NI at the tax starting rate rather than the lose £7300 income it currently starts at. We do not really have contributory benefits much these days anyway in practice - if you never pay NI you get pension credit and housing benefit which is not too different from your state pension which IS based on NI. Nor is there a huge difference in benefits if you are out of work and have paid NI and those who have never paid (there used to be much bigger differences). it is a bit of a fiction now that we have contributory benefits. A third of you income in tax and a third on all capital gains too rather than complexity of reliefs and a third for companies too would stop all these distortions which occur when people try to move income between companies and themselves and the rest.

yes bedraggled - someone using the welfare system & complaing about working does bother me.

Probably cynical, but I think by having a separate income tax and National Insurance scheme (both of which are a little obscure in what they finance), suits the governments (both Left and Right) - thus they can make a big claim that they are reducing NI by 0.5 percentage points as a "triumph for the working family", but at the same time will announce an equivalent increase on income tax (plus the usual increases on "sin taxes")....