Will we be "intentionally homeless"?

HappyMJ

mark86 wrote: »

Yeah I know, I just meant that disposable income is just that, money left lover after food and bills etc, to waste on whatever. :P

There should be almost nothing left. Which if you have an entitlement to any benefit at all won't be much more than someone on full benefits. The withdrawal rate on JSA and income support is 100% then tax credits is 41% as well as 12% NI and 20% tax. The withdrawal rate on housing and council tax benefits are 65% and 20%. Basically whatever you earn will reduce your entitlements to benefits almost pound for pound...but you do work which is a good thing.

notanewuser

mark86 wrote: »

I'd hardly call it a lifestyle choice when one option is to earn less than the other. I chose the choice which gave me more money, and more time to spend with my girl as she grows up. Not a hard choice to make is it?

For doing 24 a week i get around £680 a month. I work every Sunday now. So time and a half for 4 shifts a month makes that higher than it would be for a 24 hour contract.

On a 5/7 day 39 hour contract I wouldn't always work Sundays. But my pay would be anywhere between £850/900 after tax/nat insurance.

It IS a lifestyle choice. What would you do without tax credits? They are supporting you to work part time.

We have made a lifestyle choice for me to stay home with our daughter while my husband continues to work full time. The state does not support us because his earnings are too high. We lost a £36k salary when I stopped working, so we spend less now because we have less coming in.

What are you spending over £1k a month on that it isn't enough?!

sammyjammy

Soya milk for babies is available on prescription from your GP, this will obviously be free.

fluffymovie

mark86 wrote: »

If either of us go full time, our girl would need 2/3 days nursery a week, £120 a week for nursery and we'd lose our tax credit.

I dont' work in TC but I don't think it is quite like this.

If one of you went full time, and your paid childcare fees, you could claim some or all of these back through CTC. If you claimed LHA, again, we would allow some or all of these costs (In England anyway)

It is a shame that people shout about lifestyle choices. I am sure you are only doing the best you can and there aren't always full time jobs out there. However, I feel that there are options out there and you might need to look at making some changes which don't feel quite right at the moment.

The future for customers claiming benefits, is becoming more uncertain by the day and as much as we would like to live in a certain way, this wont' always be possible. I have no children of my own yet as I can't afford them but I know that my friend, went back to work full time as soon as her daughter was 6 weeks old because she couldn't afford to make any other choice, She would have loved a day at home as a family but it just wasn't something she could afford. Sometimes the choices we have to make, to provide for our families, are hard and seem impossible but if there are limited alternatives, what options do we all have?

Cate1976

I think it'd be worth you posting income & expenditure details on debt free wanabee board. People on there are likely to be able to suggest ways you can cut some of your costs down. One that stands out for me is possibly the soya milk, you can get a 1 litre carton of long life unsweetened from Asda for 59p, if you don't shop at Asda, check price in where you do weekly shopping. Am on phone at the moment but will post again this evening when I'm on laptop.

BigAunty

Foxn86 wrote: »

... The way to approach is either give your notice and advise council you have no where to go, they will put you in temp accommodation until they can sort you out, this make take a few weeks or months and you may not be put in the nicest of places.

This is a bit risky on the grounds that one of the tests that the council make to assess if they have any obligation to help at all is the following.

Examples of intentional homelessness

The council may decide that you deliberately did or didn't do something that caused you to become homeless if:

• you were evicted for antisocial behaviour
• you didn't pay the rent or mortgage when you could have afforded to
• you ignored advice that could have helped you keep your home
• you left accommodation that you could have continued to stay in for no good reason.

notanewuser

mark86 wrote: »

I earn around £680 4 weekly after tax and NA, my partner, around £240 a week after tax and NA.

.

Even if she's working 12 hour shifts 3 days a week (which I doubt she is) she's earning a lot more than minimum wage.

BigAunty

mark86 wrote: »

Not sure why it's so high. It's band E I believe.

It's £196 to be exact.

I had a look at the Glasgow council website and it works out at £123 per month over 12 months but I they take the payment in a 10 month period so this would be £148 with a couple of months free of payment each year.

http://www.glasgow.gov.uk/index.aspx?articleid=4722

This demonstrates that you probably do have arrears. Perhaps like myself, you found they were terrible at processing the CT bill when you moved to a new property and ended up owing the first month or two's council tax.

When I moved property, I notified them through their online wizard only to find that they do not automatically continue the direct debit at the new property, nor do they actually tell you that they cancelled it - they expect the payer to phone up and set up a new account. The first I heard about my non-payment of the council tax bill at the new address that I notified them about was a warning letter giving me a couple of weeks to pay the entire bill or be prosecuted....

mark86

BigAunty wrote: »

I had a look at the Glasgow council website and it works out at £123 per month over 12 months but I they take the payment in a 10 month period so this would be £148 with a couple of months free of payment each year.

This demonstrates that you probably do have arrears. Perhaps like myself, you found they were terrible at processing the CT bill when you moved to a new property and ended up owing the first month or two's council tax.

When I moved property, I notified them through their online wizard only to find that they do not automatically continue the direct debit at the new property, nor do they actually tell you that they cancelled it - they expect the payer to phone up and set up a new account. The first I heard about my non-payment of the council tax bill at the new address that I notified them about was a warning letter giving me a couple of weeks to pay the entire bill or be prosecuted....

It says there in the link you showed, Band E is £1,963.59 So over 10 months is around £196, what I pay. :P Includes waste and water charges.

The CT bill was sent in the post once the Letting agent gave them our details. Infact, for the first month they charged us over £300 for council tax claiming we were in the flat longer than we were.. We challenged it and they indeed over charged us, so our tax the following month was only £30 or something.

BigAunty

mark86 wrote: »

...Going back to full time means I'd get hammered with a lot more tax than I am now on part time.

It's a rubbish situation, I'd like to go back to work full time, but there isn't any point when I'd be earning less than what we have now.

You do make a valid point about the steep withdrawal of benefits and the entry into taxation that disincentivise some households from working more because they are so little better off, or not better off at all, particularly when there are travel and child care costs. We often come across posts from people who work many more hours than before and find their disposable income is no greater. But then again, we do come across posts from people who have miscalculated and would be better off working full time.


However, I thought that part time working by parents tended not to be appreciably better off unless they had a few kids? Could be wrong about that.

You will find the Turn2us online benefit calculator a good way of modelling various scenarios so you understand how different work choices will affect your benefits.

This is something that the government is trying to correct under the move to the Universal Credit system. This will also set higher expectations for parents of children of school age to work more hours than under the current tax credit system. Keep your eye on UC as the chances are that the days of parents working part time with children and receive big top ups from the public purse is going to start ending in the next handful of years - tax credits are being scrapped.