To be fed up with the amount of tax / ni I pay

[Elephantstone1]

although my salary looks decent from the outside. I’m beginning to get really fed up with the amount of tax / ni I pay.

so on £60k end up coming out with just around £3k per month from £5k after all taxes (including council tax) have been paid.

we’re not entitled to any help that others may get

my commute costs about £400 a month, but I’ve already paid tax on that money, so i have to earn about £600 a month to pay for it.

i know I’m lucky to be on a decent salary. Just with the col increasing, I’m getting a bit fed up

I absolutely take your point. But I’m not sure that there was the level of education around pensions back then that there is now? Certainly workplace pensions - outside the public sector - were rarer. I don’t think it was thought through by anyone with a meta-view ‘blimey that post-war baby boom is going to cost us in 60 years , better run a comms campaign to make sure they cover part of their own costs.’

Had the misfortune to have the mother in law over for tea yesterday!

Unfortunately, conversation turned to the economy and she claimed she was utterly appalled at all the tax increases SHE was having to pay for covid for "lazy people to sit around on furlough!"

When I asked her what tax increases she was paying, she couldn't answer - simple reason is because taxes havn't increased for her! VAT and Income tax rates are the same, she doesn't pay NIC, gets a free bus pass so no increase in travel costs!

Instead, she's had an inflation busting increase in her state pension and her widow's pension from her husbands 40+ years of working (she never worked since getting pregnant at 19!).

She still whinges about them taking away her free TV licence.

Constantly whingeing about the young "wasting" money on phones, cars, houses (not quite sure where she thinks they'd live if they didn't spend on houses but there you go!).

It started from a conversation we were having with our 21 year old son who's facing having to pay close on £1k per month for a studio flat in the town where he's got a job after leaving Uni this Summer. With rent, power, rates, insurance, bus pass, basic food, telecoms, he'll have nothing left from his starting salary of £30k. All she said was that she couldn't believe he was on such a high starting salary! She's completely out of touch with reality, especially in the towns/cities where there are decent jobs for graduates!

Her expenses are way lower than her pension income and she saves money every month, building up pretty healthy savings accounts (over £100k plus she owns her own house).

Her pension increase is a lot more than the extra she's spending on food and power, so she's a net "gainer" from the past few years.

People like her really shouldn't be given the vote.

If she's whining about furlough, she'd better have been anti lockdown too. Because it would've been impossible to have an effective lockdown without paying lots of people enough money to be able to stay at home comfortably. I have no patience with people who refuse to acknowledge that.

There will always be stupid people of all ages. You’d have to disbar half the population from voting if you used it as a reason.

Oh, she wanted lockdowns, but apparently just didn't want those unable to work to have any kind of financial support. Heaven knows what she thought would happen when people couldn't pay their rent/mortgages etc. Trouble is, when, like her, she's sponged off people most of her life, first her husband with her being a SAHM since aged 20 and then the taxpayer with her pensions, you lose track of reality of what it's like to actually have to work to earn money to pay essential bills. So hilariously ironic that she expected today's workers to have no income when she spent 40 years of her "working life", not actually working and not earning money herself, just spending money earned by others. But she just can't see it!

Yes, sadly I agree, she voted for Brexit too, for all the wrong reasons.

I don't so much mind the Brexit voters who actually did a bit of critical thinking, research, etc., but she just voted for it because "all those foreigners taking our jobs" - hilarious as she's never worked since aged 20, and none of our close families have suffered any significant unemployment, so she's had no direct experience of any of her family being unemployed for more than a few weeks, and it certainly had no impact on her husband who likewise was never unemployed. She basically had no real knowledge of just whose jobs she thinks these foreigners were taking!

Heaven knows where they get these half baked ideas from.

Heaven knows where they get these half baked ideas from.

The side of a bus? They voted overwhelmingly Leave In Sunderland, despite having no immigrant community and their main employer, Nissan, being explicit that it would damage its viability. Turkeys voting for Christmas.

Doesn't sound like she's thinking at all.

I don't have a lot of patience for people who thought it a good idea to shut down the economy and destroy independent businesses for a flu. (oh sorry, the flu went on sabbatical in 2020, it was the special sabbatical-cover flu-like illness). What in the world is an 'effective' lockdown? Would that be the one that increased national debt, global poverty, and created the biggest wealth transfer to the billionaire class of our lives?

This is how I feel. I’m always just one step ahead of the bracket changes. Bought my house needing everything doing as a single mum bottom end of market £144k - paid around £1500 stamp I believe out of a total of £6k I had left to pay taxes and do it up! The next year they abolished stamp for that bracket. Child benefit bracket finally moves to a decent salary of £60k just as my salary does too. Then if you have the audacity to save any of the money you’ve already paid tax on, woe betide you if you earn more than £500 interest on it, Bam they take that too. I try and help my mum out who is elderly with her flat rental as the mortgage can’t be in her name any more, nope, doing that in my name means I LOSE money, as they don’t let you take the mortgage payments off the rental income. They take the whole amount as profit when it’s not ans paying 40% means I’m negative. I agree with taxes but they’ve got to start looking at all those self employed people and business owners. Us PAYE taxed middle have been ransacked.

If your salary only just went over £60k as the bracket changed are you sure that once you deduct pension you won’t come back under £60k for purposes of assessing your entitlement to CB? Or it might be worth just putting a bit extra in your pension and claiming the benefit.

I actually think tax is amazing value. For £2k per month you get -
Children educated
Roads to drive on
Streetlights
Healthcare
Police should you need them
A fire service
Your bins emptied
Courts
Unemployment and sickness benefits should you need it.
State pension
Military protection
Embassy's abroad should you need help
Social services
Libraries
Street cleaning
Environmental health
Etc etc etc
Imagine if we paid no tax and you had to fund all that stuff yourself out of that £2k

Amazing...or would be if half of those things were actually done properly. Gang crime and spate of burglaries/car theft near me at the moment not a copper in sight and even with ring cameras, footage etc not one person arrested, bins are twice a month not nearly enough, streets are disgusting, roads are full of potholes, class sizes are too big and nobody can get into the local schools (we live around the corner from two schools none of which my children are able to go to) pensions will be dead and gone by the time a lot of us retire, our military is unfortunately a joke to the world now we are going to find it extremely difficult defending ourselves. We pay an absolute fortune in tax every year and see very little in return for it. I am happy to pay our share if only we could see the benefits of it but we don't a lot of our tax money gets spent in frivolous, stupid ways that's what people are really upset about.

Do you mean you lay £2k per month?

I know I’ve paid much more than that at times

Some pay very little too

Unfortunately that’s just life. Doesn’t bother me particularly, your salary in Scotland probably puts you in the top 10% of earners.

I hate how much tax and ni I pay legitimately as paye, whereas all SE pay little on tax returns, £1k or £2k. It's all bullshit.

Very sorry you are unhappy with your tax bill @Oblomov23 but when I was SE (now retired) my tax bills rarely came in at less than £5k in January and the same in July, and that was in the 90s. And I had no recourse to public assistance if anything went wrong. Heaven forbid that I was seriously ill. I think my full entitlement to maternity benefits totalled £800, in 1999.

I don't earn a lot through my self employment but I declare all my income and the tax I pay is "legitimate".

That's not correct. I've been SE for years and pay tax at the income tax rates

It was higher than that

Absolute ignorant rubbish.

@Hopper123 out of interest, why can't your children get into the schools "round the corner"? And what "frivolous and stupid things" are your taxes spent on?

Because all of the schools where we live are oversubscribed and getting in is like gold dust yes even if you live around the corner and i mean literally around the corner and 3 minutes up the road. We did have one child in but even having a sibling didn't do anything as we couldn't get the other two in so we had to move them all so I wasn't doing 2 school runs and a nursery run in opposite directions every day. When civil servants I know (friends) had no work for 6 months, spent their days having a bath and watching tv whilst wiggling their mouse on the DEI training and quizzes they were given because there was no work to do on full pay and pension contributions ya know that kind of wast of tax contributions. Oh and surely we haven't forgotten the bailing out of banks. You can't tell me that you think your tax is spent sensibly in this country have you seen the state of the place? And yet money is always suspiciously available for random wars we help fund.

As a couple who do self assessments every year I can assure you our tax bill is very much legitimate and a lot more than 1 or 2k I wish it was just that!!! But we always pay it...in full...and on time because we know we have to contribute to society. Do we do everything we legally can to ensure we are paying as little as we can of course we do as would you (if you found out you had been put in wrong tax bracket on PAYE and had paid more than you needed to are you telling me you wouldnt ask for a rebate?) people who run their own businesses are not evil people they just want to work for themselves and not all of them earn as much as you may think. For a lot of people working for themselves is worth more than earning more in a regular job.