Marriage Allowance

Personally if I had known the amount of hours I would have spent on the married persons tax break I would never have applied and my advice is that unless you feel really really confident navigating HMRC, stay away from this one.

When my kids were born I took a massive pay cut to care for them. I work at their school and only earn 10,522 a year. My husband is a public sector worker on 32,500 so this tax break seemed made for us. However, to date we have made a profit of £20 on this and spent more than 16 hours trying to navigate Hmrc. Stay away from this tax break!
Some months after I applied I recieved a letter saying that I owed HMRC £80. I rang Hmrc, (every call takes on average 35 minutes, I have always been time poor) the call handler explained that I could either pay or have it taken from my wages through my PAYE. I would have preferred PAYE but she advised me to pay on line. I had a payment card in my hand but nothing so simple for HMRC. I had to pay on line.
So you guys who get paid a lot and have to deal with HMRC probably know all this, but I had screaming toddlers and meals to cook and bed time bedlam and it was really difficult. In order to pay on line I had to register through the government gateway. In order to register through the government gateway I had to have a text sent to me. It's a lot to concentrate on when you are trying to do lots of other stuff and seemed overly complicated. I just wanted to pay £80. It was the beginning of the month and we had the money so I wanted to do it now. Surely I must have this wrong I thought? There must be a simpler way to pay. So I got back on the phone to hmrc.
Again this call took 35 minutes but during the call the hold message kept telling me to check online as it was 'simple and easy' so whilst waiting and cooking (a quite yummy shepherds pie,) and putting my daughter back on the naughty step, I read an on line page that said that if you owed under £3000 then this could be collected from your PAYE.
THANK GOODNESS. That was much more sensible.
Except I didn't read it properly because it turned out that it said if you were a low earner they could not take it from your tax.
I got two reminder letters to pay and in fairness both times I tried to ring HMRC but the waiting on the phone was something I just didn't have the time for, and anyway the message would always tell me to look on line.
You end up getting stuck in a loop, paying on line is complicated and you have to call when it goes wrong. When the reminder letters turned up it wasn't always a good time of the month for us.
So stupid me ended up with a £100 fine plus the original £80 and now they told me I had to self assess. This time I needed to wait on the phone. The call took 28 minutes. It turned out that I earn to little for them to take it from my PAYE(but not too little to fine me £100). Self assessment is hugely complex.
You have to first join the government gateway which is complicated and you need credit on your mobile too. In order to join the government gateway they send you a number in the post that takes 9 days to arrive. Getting on to the gateway ended up taking two weeks and three calls, as there is errors on their database. Once I got in self assessment was hugely complicated and when I thought I had completed it, yesterday I got a letter which says I've done it wrong. So now I assume I'm being fined £10 a day. I have cried so much over this.
A tax break to help married couples they said.
They can bloody well keep it. Stay away.