Paying off credit cards and loans classed as Deprivation of Capital?

fluffymovie

I think there are a lot of threads on the forum about this topic but as I have said before, to say it's deprivation of capital, the council need to show that the claimants primary intention in spending the money, was to claim or increase their award of benefit.

The issues around essential loan repayments vs minimum repayments don't really come into it.

Equally, if you pay your rent in advance, it would not be considered capital unless they decide that your over riding motive was to take advantage of the scheme.

Those of us who work in benefits aren't going to criticise your choices and just apply the regulations the best way we know how

property.advert

seven-day-weekend wrote: »

AFAIK you have to just repay the minimum repayments otherwise it will be classed as deprivation of capital. There is no legal requirement to pay more than this, therefore as far as the benefits system is concerned, you should not pay any extra/

That is not true. There is a legal requirement to pay off all the outstanding debt and the debt is callable, meaning that the lender can, without notice or with very short notice, cancel the revolving credit facility and legally demand full repayment of all outstanding sums.

Given the the OP has lost his job, they would likely consider at least some reduction in the credit lines were they aware of the full facts.

maureen_04

You also need to be aware that DWP include any monies that you have saved for bills etc as savings, also any money a partner may have.
A similar thing happened to me a while ago and I was stopped £3PW from my IS. The stop £1 PW for every £250 over the benchmark figure that you have, they include any capital, shares, premium bonds and as stated previously any money saved for bills. I used to put money away each month for water rates and TV licence in the end rather than save the money each month I decided to pay monthly by DD direct so that I did not incur any excess money in the bank.
DWP can be very picky, once they "mark your card" so to speak they continue to watch your accounts.
This is of course acceptable if you are acting fraudulently but if you are just trying to get by it is ridiculous. Best to be up front from the start.

sunnyday123_2

fluffymovie wrote: »

I think there are a lot of threads on the forum about this topic but as I have said before, to say it's deprivation of capital, the council need to show that the claimants primary intention in spending the money, was to claim or increase their award of benefit.

The issues around essential loan repayments vs minimum repayments don't really come into it.

Equally, if you pay your rent in advance, it would not be considered capital unless they decide that your over riding motive was to take advantage of the scheme.

Those of us who work in benefits aren't going to criticise your choices and just apply the regulations the best way we know how

Another issue in paying my rent in advance is because my ex partner is still on the tenancy agreement and I have asked the estate agent to redo the agreement with just my name on it and they said that they will have to re-reference me again according to affordability. Obviously as I wont have a job I will need to show that I can pay my rent and the way to show them this is to pay some rent up front. They said that this was fine with them as I am paying it in advance and they won't need to go through the whole re-referencing thing.

mommacrab

Going back to claiming contribution based JSA - I did this after taking voluntary redundancy. After six weeks of claiming I received a letter from them stating that I may not actually be entitled to it as I left voluntarily without having any prospects of another job, so they were basically going to investigate my claim. Now I was upfront about everything with them, on the phone and face to face. So I penned a very long letter to them giving times, dates and names of people I had spoken to regarding my JSA claim. Fortunately the next week I got a part-time job so at my next signing-on day I was able to tell them that I no longer needed to claim. I received a letter two weeks later saying that no further action would be taken.

So what I guess I am saying is make notes of everything you say when making a JSA claim and reiterate that you are taking voluntary redundancy. This may mean that your JSA is sanctioned, which I only found out about after I had finished claiming - not once was I informed that this could happen.