How much will my ESA reduce by if i declare £20k savings?

at11

Hi,
I have been on ESA and DLA for 4 years due to MS,
I tried going back into work recently for a month but my eyes, hands and cognition failed so i couldnt do the job despite utmost effort.

so i now need to reapply for ESA, before i was on income related ESA but i have been saving up a lot of the money and successfully invested and re-invested it so now have £20k in savings,

on the form i can tick 'income related' if i have less than £16k savings which i dont

So what is the difference in how much ESA you receive if you're on income related or not?

- i dont want to hide the fact i have £20k in a ISA + Stocks and shares ISA, but how much will it hurt my ESA income?

also i plan to go oversee's later this year for a treatment costing £20k (HSCT for MS), hence the savings, - unfortunately the NHS wont treat any experimental MS treatments
.. so this £20k wont be there in 6 months

sizzler1893

Surely it won't matter how it affects your ESA seeing as your not going to hide the £20k

Torry_Quine

For incme based ESA if you have savings over £16,000 you will get nothing although you could still apply and get your NI credits.

Cyclamen

would you be entitled to contributions based esa?

Two4Tuesday

So you were previously claiming Income related ESA whilst having around £20K in investments and savings, but didn't declare them?

And now you want to reclaim but declare the savings?

In case you are on the level, you might be entitled to contributions related ESA if you were previously entitled to that (with income based top-up), your previous claim links with the new one, and you were in the Support Group.

From what you wrote, it would appear that you committed fraud by not declaring your changed savings/assets level during your previous claim.

As for suddenly spending the £20K - that might be seen as deprivation of capital.

This has all the hallmarks of another Andy post.

rogerblack

at11 wrote: »

Hi,
I have been on ESA and DLA for 4 years due to MS,
I tried going back into work recently for a month but my eyes, hands and cognition failed so i couldnt do the job despite utmost effort.

so i now need to reapply for ESA, before i was on income related ESA but i have been saving up a lot of the money and successfully invested and re-invested it so now have £20k in savings,

If you were actually on income-related ESA, and you have had savings of over 6K, then your ESA should have been reduced.
If it has not, you have been overpaid.
If you have had savings of over 16K at any time while being paid income-related ESA, your ESA should have stopped.
Assuming that you saved from 0-20K over 4 years.
First year end, you had 5K savings.
Second year end, you had 10K savings, your ESA will be affected by 16 pounds a month.
Third year end, you had 15K savings, your ESA will be reduced by 36 pounds.
Shortly into the fourth year, you stop being entitled to ESA.

You will have been overpaid by at least 8000 pounds or so (I haven't done the exact numbers).
You will have failed to tell them about your savings changes, as they said you must on the initial application.
8000 pounds is considerably over the threshold for criminal prosecution.

You need to contact them, and offer to pay it all back, due to your oversight.

Otherwise, they can criminally prosecute you, and then follow on with a confiscation of assets procedure, in which they can do things they normally would not be able to to recover assets - such as selling your only house.

trudiha

Or the OP could have migrated from IB to ESA and claimed ESA for less than a year, none of that would have been means tested.

fed_up_and_stressed

On another thread he is on income based Esa with £5000 in savings

Rev

I'm more interested in how you managed to save 20k whilst on ESA. I'm currently on ESA and can't manage to save 20p a month.

What did you invest in?

JACEY

For every £250 over £6000 they take off £1

cattie

And remember that DWP do data matching with the tax office, so even though an ISA is tax free, it will still show up on any data matching search the DWP choose to do. So it is important that all savings over & above the amount allowed are declared.

It won't make any difference that you only mean for the savings to be there for approx 6 months, it is still money in your name.