Self assessment for the first time

[Strategies25]

I wonder if anyone can give me advice on this…

my salary has been £61k for about 15 months, but has gone back down again to £44k as my hours changed.

I just received a letter from hmrc saying that I need to pay the high income child benefit charge.

I followed the instructions to do it through PAYE, but once I’d logged in it told me I couldn’t use PAYE because there is an overdue amount from last year.

so it seems like my only option is to do a self assessment.

I’ve never been self employed so never needed to do one before.

I’ve tried the hmrc chatbot but it just goes round in circles. And I haven’t managed to get through to anyone from hmrc on the phone.

My questions are:
— is doing a self assessment a complete nightmare? I only have one source of income- my job.

— if I do a self assessment now do I then need to do one every year from now on?

— surely if I spoke to someone on the phone they’d be able to sort it out for me?

I did a self assessment for the first time this year for the same reason. There's a few hoops to jump through but it was loads easier than I thought it was going to be.

Pretty sure you don't need to self assess next year too.

I would try and phone them explaining this, Tax Returns are not particularly difficult. It might be worthwhile you making an additional pension payment to take you under the child benefit limit.

The first time takes a couple of hours as you don’t know what you are doing and if you are like me you are petrified of making a mistake - but actually it’s not that bad

they will ask every year after that but you can just phone and they will take the requirement off if you explain that you no longer earn that much

before start - you need your end of year payslip
also for any bank or savings accounts get the total interest earned over that year

if you make regular charity donations - you want to add them up for the year in question also

there is a space where you can note down any areas you might be confused about

We pay an accountant about £200 to do our tax return, (over 100k threshold so required), we were worried we would input the wrong amounts in the wrong sections, feel a lot happier getting an accountant to do it (they do all the admin with HMRC, you give them all details required, payslips etc and after it’s all done you just login to HMRC and pay anything if owed)

you say 61k for about 15 months but now gone down
on the face of that you must do self assessment (SA) as you have now gone past the cutoff date that would allow you to repay what was due for the previous tax year via PAYE

for someone earning 61k doing SA is not a great intellectual challenge. Just remember that you must declare all sources of income, so earnings, interest, dividends and any other taxable receipts (excluding anything in an ISA)

having been brought into SA you can request to leave it when you know that your income / tax liability has reverted to basic rate. It it quicker to ask to leave than wait for HMRC to spot that themselves as obviously their info is after the event,

someone on the phone will be a call centre person whose only authority is to follow instructions on the screen that tells them:

@Strategies25 Self assessment when you are PAYE is time consuming but not difficult. It’s finding the info that takes the time.

I personally set up a spreadsheet to calculate each element e.g. saving’s interest, shares income, gift aid etc. which I update throughout the year.

Do it online and expand the help sections as these really set out what to include.

Just to say if you don’t need to do future tax returns, make sure you call HMRC to let them know and get them to remove you from self-assessment. Lots don’t realise that the onus is on the taxpayer to do that!

I changed my pension contributions 15 months ago to ensure I was below the limit, but weirdly it hasn’t affected my tax at all. Not too sure how that all works but towards the end of the year I start getting charged more tax,

if you don't understand the way pension contributions tax relief works then read up on it, it depends what type of pension you have and whether you have to manually claim that relief yourself given you were (still are?) a higher rate taxpayer
Tax on your private pension contributions: Tax relief - GOV.UK

if you want to be told then you will need to give us an idea of your gross income, pension contribution %, and pension type

at what point in the year did your tax code change as that is the only way in which the amount of tax you pay can increase or decrease during the year. What explanation for that change was shown on the code notification?