How much do you get in tax credits?

[charliecat]

We get ....Household income of 27.000 2 kids 3.04 a week ..skint.

just goint ot go and make another baby then

Always knew DS3 would come in handy some day

Could I count the cat...hes expensive!

Hang on I'll check .... no, sorry, no tick box for 'number of felines'

Depends on your income though. And also, if you're a lone parent or not.

I've always suspected that there's a massive increase for being a lone parent, because I get such a large amount compared to two parent families on a modest income. Come to think of it, I'm going to test it...

Well I just re-ran my mythical family but without the SAHparent - figures came out the same as 2 parents.

Same as 2 parents? One being sah? Or not?

Assumed one parent earning, one SAH.

Took the SAH out and the outcomes were the same.

I've just done exactly the same, and got a 2K difference!

Am far too tired and confused, and must go and watch Question Time, but will do another one tomorrow - this is bizarre.

Message withdrawn

Socci - if you've told them about all changes and they've still got it wrong there's a form they can give you to fill in to stop them reclaiming the money, but you usually have to ask, they don't publicise it well.

As to the formula for tax credits, I've managed to glean a tiny bit of info but don't shoot me if its wrong, the IR don't make it easy to confirm!!

CHILD TAX CREDIT - will be given to some amount as long as your (combined) income is under £58k. The threshold for CTC is £13,910. Under that you get the max CTC, over that you get 37p deducted for every £1 over you earn. But you're guaranteed a minimum of £545 a year if you're joint income is under £50k. As far as I can see the max is £1670.08 a year. However, that figure is worked out from IR site itself and my tax credit award for this year has awarded me more than that so its basically a joke.

WORKING TAX CREDIT - Threshold drops to £5,220 if you're eligible for this too, and the same applies - every £1 over gets 37p deducted from max. You get extra if you work over 30 hours a week or if someone in your family is disabled but how they work that out is beyond me. The max seems to be £2888.64 a year.

But a better way to work it out is times your dog's age by 300, add the number of times you've been to the loo in the last week and deduct the ages of your kids from that number - it'll probably come out more accurate.

Dp earns around £14000 and we get £104 CTC and £8 WTC a week.

Think it is gonna go down when I finally send the renwal thing in though.

Oh and we have 3 kids

£42 a month 1x DS is 18mths. DH full time, me 16 hrs.

Just had it through this morning

I get no WFTC. Only CTC. Charliecat - if you are not claiming CTC that's probably about right. Sorry if the Conv has moved on

I've got a calculating program which estimates it and is a lot easier to fiddle and try what if with than the online IR one. I'll try to post it online somewhere later - or I can send it direct to anyone who wants to CAT me.

£79 a week, I'm a sahm / student, 3 ds's no baby under one

CTC, no WTC as dh earns £17900

We have ds (15 months) and they think we earn 21,000 between us, both over 16 hours. We get £44 a month.

However I'm now self employed, although not full time. God knows what that will do to it.

DH and I are both self employed and I estimated our joint income last year would be about 30K. They awarded us around £80/month. However our actual income turned out to be only £18K. Once I phoned the correct figs through they reassessed it to around £250/month and paid us a lump sum direct into our account of over £2400. I was very impressed with the speed of response (sorry I know many others are having lots of probs but TCs have been great for us.) The problem I now have is that they have reassessed our 05/06 income to be the same as the actual 04/05 income and are now paying us about £300/month, but hopefully we will earn a lot more this year. I am going to ask them to reduce it because there's no way I want to be faced with paying it back next summer, even though it's really useful to us now. When you don't have a stable income it's quite tricky to assess what your needs might be from one month to the next.

wordsmith - stick the extra in an ING account until you're asked for it back.

We have an estimated joint income this year of £29k, our childcare for 2 kids is estimated at £5460, we were awarded £2574 after they took off what we were overpaid for the year before.

Our earnings for this year will go up so that will be even MORE they have overpaid us!!!! Idiots.

I thought that (very roughly) for a two parent family everyone got around £500 a year. If you earn under about £21,000 you might get extra for having low earnings and if you earn a lot less than this you might also get WTC. If you want to be able to claim towards childcare, both parents must be working over 16 hours per week and earning under £21,000-ish in total, then you can get about 70% of your childcare costs.

I work in Adult Ed and was teaching about 11 hours a week, which meant doing another 5 - 8 hours preparation a week. Because this 'unpaid' work is written into my contract but not counted as worked hours we could not claim the childcare costs element. I went partially self-employed to get more hours and past the magic barrier of 16 hours - then we earned too much as a household, so still no childcare and then just down the basic £500. We currently owe them around £1,500 through no fault of our own - my DH is self-employed so his final figures for each year are not available until well after the end of year, so everything is ages out of date. At one point we were getting about £150 a month, but that was based on our income when I was on unpaid maternity leave.

What I have been told doesn't sound as though it adds up with Toothache's figures though? On what I was told your income is too high to be entitled to help with childcare - although there might be other factors (none of my business!!!)

I know it is all very complicated and everyone situation is different but they don't even give you a decent explanation of what you are getting and why. It's easy now - we get nothing until the debt is cleared!!

Good idea Tinker but I'm not that organised. I would rather not be faced with the temptation in the first place -especially as we do actually need every penny at the mo.

Nopearls I agree it is very hard to understand the forms. Self-employment is a really tricky one because you often have no idea what you are going to earn. In theory we could earn hundreds of thousands in a good year, or nothing in a bad one. (Tends to be nearer the latter than the former unfortunately ). As far as I am aware the amount you get rises and falls on a sliding scale and isn't fixed above a certain income level, but I may be wrong. Don't understand how they wor out the childcare element at all.

i have one kid. annual income last year (BEFORE tax) was £49,000

i get £91 a month

We get £545.00 in a year. We have it going into a savings account and don't touch it as dh is convinced that one day they will ask for it all back again (we have had problems with IR in the past).