Spouse's income and IPA

Lemsip

My husband and I will be discharged in September. I earn very little and have no IPA, whereas my husband has been paying into his for the past 8 months.

I was hoping to get some extra hours / second job / go freelance once discharged, but would my husband have to declare my additional income and therefore pay more into his IPA (and therefore all extra money earned by me would be taken)?

fermi

It would change the balance of the household expenses and may end up in him having to pay a little more, but not by anywhere near the full amount.

They can't directly take any of your increase if you do not have an IPA.

Reason being is that how you would be expected to split shared household expenses would change. Rather than presumably the case is as now where he is covering all or most of them, if you earned say 1/3 of what he does then you would be executed to pay 1/3 of the shared bills and hence him only 2/3. So him paying less shared expenses would increase his IPA surplus by a little. Not by the amount full amount you earn extra, but by the amount you would be expected to pay to expenses and he would therefore not have to.

Plug your potential figures into the IPA calculator Post 01 December 2010

Lemsip

Well that would make sense, thankyou! I thought perhaps it would not be worth the hassle if I were to be working extra but with absolutely nothing to show for it until his IPA had been resolved.

What in the case of doing irregular freelance work on top of my current job - I would only know my actual income after I'd done my tax return many months down the line. Would they then expect a lump sum (if I made a reasonable profit) or just use that figure to work an average for a monthly increase from that point forward?