I'll try and keep this brief.
When I was on Mat leave, my allowance was £600 odd a month. My partner was on £30k a year at the time, and this plus our over £12k combined savings meant we were entitled to £6 a month of UC. Even though the entitledto calculator said we'd likely get more (that's why I thought I'd ask here!)
Now I'm back at work full time. We earn combined £58k but our combined savings is now £6k - £8k. The entitledto calculator says UC could reimburse our childcare costs, I think it was over £600, I can't remember the exact amount but I know it would help us a lot. Our daughter is in nursery four days a week and on average it costs us £1400 a month. We can't afford for one of us to not work because of rent, utilities, etc.
We use tax free childcare which isn't a lot but does help and certainly isn't to be sniffed at. I know we can't claim this plus UC.
My question is, does anyone think it likely we'll be better off on a UC claim than on tax free childcare? My worry is we will cancel the tax free and UC will give us less than the tax free, or we'll submit our childcare costs and have to pay them in full and will be waiting for ages for the UC reimbursement.
The tricky thing is, I don't quite understand assessment periods but my partner gets paid at the end of every month and I get paid on the 10th of every month, will this confuse things? Our nursery bill is due by the tenth of the month so my partner pays it on the 9th and I send him my half on the 10th (we don't have a joint bank account which we are quite happy with).
I ask here because last time we did the entitledto calculator, I know it's not a guarantee but we input everything correctly and honestly and it said we could get a few hundred of UC every month, but once the claim went through we only got £6. And that's when I was on mat leave. But I think our savings amount at the time had something to do with it.
I'm already bitter that we both work full time salaried positions and are considering UC for childcare alone. I'm not even sure my daughter will qualify for the upcoming funded hours, she turns two in the middle of April and I think we can't apply till autumn term, but that's another question by itself!