what benefits, if taking a part time job?

emilyteach1

Dawning wrote: »

I live in my own house, I checked my positiion on entitled to (cant link yet as I'm newly registered), and there was no council tax entitlement. Do you think it's worth my while to contact the council to see if there is any more help available?

I'm not an expert, but I can't understand why there'd be no entitlement to council tax assistance. Obviously, your exact circumstances dictate eligibility, but to be earning £480pm and having no eligibility at all would be unusual. I'd definitely approach the council, it can't hurt! These online calculators are just estimates, after all.

I just ran a dummy quite through entitledto as a self-employed homeowner liable for a £700 annual council tax bill, after the 25% single person's discount [your own council tax bill may well be higher than that!]. I found I would be 'entitled' to £4.16 per week in council tax benefit. Not a massive amount by any means, but it represents about 1/3rd of the annual bill.

On another note, is there nothing you can do to stretch out the hours you're working? I am not advocating recording false hours, but I mean is there anything else you could do on a self-employed basis to bump your hours up a bit? Of course, it doesn't need to be related to the nature of the work you usually perform, it just needs to be virtually any manner of paid work for the extra 5 hours per week.

Dawning

emilyteach1 wrote: »

I'm not an expert, but I can't understand why there'd be no entitlement to council tax assistance. Obviously, your exact circumstances dictate eligibility, but to be earning £480pm and having no eligibility at all would be unusual. I'd definitely approach the council, it can't hurt! These online calculators are just estimates, after all.

I just ran a dummy quite through entitledto as a self-employed homeowner liable for a £700 annual council tax bill, after the 25% single person's discount [your own council tax bill may well be higher than that!]. I found I would be 'entitled' to £4.16 per week in council tax benefit. Not a massive amount by any means, but it represents about 1/3rd of the annual bill.

On another note, is there nothing you can do to stretch out the hours you're working? I am not advocating recording false hours, but I mean is there anything else you could do on a self-employed basis to bump your hours up a bit? Of course, it doesn't need to be related to the nature of the work you usually perform, it just needs to be virtually any manner of paid work for the extra 5 hours per week.

Thanks for that. My CT is £109 a month over 10 months, that includes the 25% single discount. So its a huge chunk out of my money. It's only become a problem since I lost two other contracts this year due to the companies going out of business.

I will speak to the council tomorrow.
Thanks again.