Starting small self employed work while claiming Carer's Allowance and UC - advice please!

[pinkginforthewin]

I'm looking for some advice on benefits / tax please. I've been a SAHM for years now. My husband works FT.

I claim Carers Allowance as I have a caring responsibility for a family member. We receive UC due to ages of our children and our income being significantly less than having two working parents.

I'm going to a delivering a one hour session a week for a local company - I'm not going to be actually employed by them AFAIK, think it's more of a self employed role - that bit is something I need to suss out with them! They are legitimate BTW as I've been involved with them for years (have used their service, now I'm going to be delivering it!)

I won't be earning a huge amount from it realistically, probs something like £100 a month to start with.

I'm trying to suss out what I need to do in terms of benefits. As it's well under the CA limits, it shouldn't affect that. Will I need to do a tax return? I'll be keeping my own records of income. How will this affect UC? The UC bit confuses me the most.

Thanks!

Once you earn more than £1,000 on a self-employed basis then you have to register with HMRC as being self-employed. This applies even if you don't earn over the tax free limit.

With UC, if you are going self-employed then they would typically invite you for an interview and ask about your plans, to see if this is a serious business proposal. They would typically expect you to work full time being self employed.

In your case, it appears that this would just be a sideline? In that case you just need to inform them of this. People who are self-employed typically have to show their income and expenses each month.

They may ask you to complete a form each month showing your income and how many miles you drove for work related purposes (you get 55p per mile allowance) and any other expenses you might have had. They will then take the 'profit' you made that month as your income when calculating the amount of UC you get.

I do some self employed work alongside my main role and declared it them. I then had a phone call to go through the guidelines where they confirmed due to my paid work my self employed stuff didn’t have to bring in a minimum income.

I get a to do in my journal once a month to add my self employed income and expenses - they work out the profit and alter my UC payment accordingly.

I keep a spreadsheet of my income and expenses to use when I do my self assessment.

I think you should write this in your journal. Pretty much what you said here.
'I'm starting self employed work for x company, doing 1 hr a week at y pay rate. What, if anything do I need to show you in regards to this pls? And how will it affect the amount of UC?'