Long-winded thread title, sorry!
I'll try to explain.
I do self-employed cleaning work on the days I'm not at uni. Some weeks are better paid than others.
Due to my variable income, i need to provide bank statements/evidence to the housing office every four weeks to assess my entitlement to housing benefit.
I received a letter from the council earlier this week stating that I was not entitled to HB these past three weeks, and must call them to make arrangements to pay it back.
Basically, i received a final demand for my quarterly gas bill of £220 a few weeks previously, and so ransacked the house for things to sell. This included a few things in cash through gumtree (TV, an old phone, some uni books, etc) and other things on Ebay. In total, i made just under £200 from these sales.
I transferred all the money from the cash sales and Paypal to my bank account. And immediately paid the late gas bill with my debit card.
And I've now learnt this money is counted as an income and I've wrongly been receiving HB these past few weeks.
Whereas if I hadn't sold these items, and they were just sitting in my house, i would have been perfectly entitled to the HB.
I'm not sure I'm even making sense anymore now that I've typed all of this out.
I'm trying to explain that this money wasn't extra/treat money per se. Technically i had it all along but in the form of objects. I had to sell my things - for a reason - to get it. Things I will probably need to buy again to replace the sold ones in the near future.
So somebody mega rich (who was renting for some reason) could go out and spend all of their millions of pounds on gold to make their bank balance reach £0 so that they could also claim HB? Despite having a house full of gold? But it's perfectly fine to have a house full of gold and receive HB, as long as it's not in the form of money?
I'm not making any sense, am I? I've to go for a meeting with the housing officer tomorrow to discuss paying this back and I'm just feeling rubbish about it.