JSA to Self Employed

Wozzie

Okay I just want to get peoples thoughts on this whilst I research this myself as I've been reading so much that I'm starting to feel like I can't see the wood for the trees.

Basically I've been signing on for about a year and a half now, and frankly I'm fed up. Before then I spent a long time caring for elderly relatives and during that time I was doing a lot of freelance work because I needed to be able to pick and choose my hours and needed to be at home.

In general this sucked but it did have one huge benefit that being that my cost of living was pretty much zero, this allowed me to do pretty much whatever I wanted and I used that opportunity to go to university.

Things however changed a couple of years ago when my nan died and my grandad got moved into a home. There was a lot of faffing around with the council trying to evict me from my place and trying to pretend they didn't have a duty to house me.

Eventually that got sorted and I'm fine, but the resulting gap on my CV and lack of current references seems to be killing me in the job market. In a year I've had a grand total of 5 interviews however during that time I have been frequently approached with freelance work which I was under the impression I was unable to take.

Thing is after being on the work programme for 6 months I let that slip to my advisor and she began explaining that I would be able to take that work and it wouldn't effect benefits provided I didn't earn over £70 or work more than 16 hours.

This led into a bigger conversation about benefits, working tax credits and self employment.

The way she sold it kind of sounded like the inverse dole, as in where jobseekers allowance seems to be predicated on your doing nothing and hoping one of your lottery ticke... sorry, I mean CV's/applications come good, the situation she sold is essentially exactly what I want.

Basically you register self employed, your housing benefit and council tax support is uneffected. You are free to do whatever you want and your benefits are uneffected unless your earnings outstrip your requirements for benefits.

Obviously you no longer get JSA but she said that as long as you're working 30 hours a week you can get £50 working tax credit, but there's nothing to say those 30 hours have to be paid.

So for instance if you spend 10 hours a day trying to hustle for work but for some inexplicable reason come up empty you still get £50 WTC to live on.

To me this sounds almost too good to be true, for me the main benefit of working would have been shrugging off the chains and restricions the job centre put on you. People always just say "Well if you can go freelance just do it!" and that's one thing when your cost of living is zero it's another thing entirely when you have to cover bills.

Freelance can be very weird. One minute you can be pulling your hair out because you have more work that you could ever possibly do, and the next you could be pulling your hair out because nobody will touch you with a 10 foot pole let alone pay for the privilige.

Starting however is always shakey, and that was my concern as you need time to build.

Now clearly these people get paid or get bonuses for people they get signed off so I get their desire to make this a lucrative option but as a digital artist/graphic designer if this situation does work as she says then this could free me and allow me to dedicate all the time I spend looking for work into actually working.

Which frankly would increase my chances of full time employment exponentially, you get far more opportunities when you're actually doing productive stuff for people.

But when anything seems too good to be true that's usually because it is, so I'm wondering if there's a mamoth pitfall in this equation that I can't see and she's glossing over?

PlutoinCapricorn

There was a time when JobCentres were encouraging people to 'start their own businesses' just to get the unemployment figures down. Many of these enterprises were not real businesses: the occasional sale on eBay for example. Some people were naive, others exploited the system by realising that they could top up their benefits without having to provide the job search evidence required for JSA.

Things are changing and tightening up, to stop this abuse of the system.

PlutoinCapricorn

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/revenue-and-customs-brief-7-2015-new-rules-for-the-self-employed-claiming-working-tax-credit/revenue-and-customs-brief-7-2015-new-rules-for-the-self-employed-claiming-working-tax-credit

Wozzie

Thanks for that though I must confess I really don't know what to make of your comments. It doesn't confirm or contradict what I was asking.

All I want to know is whether or not I'd risk becoming homeless if I went self employed? I can work for myself, I'd like to have regular steady employment but as nobody seems to be willing to give that to me I see no reason to not try to give that to myself.

I know how hard it is to build a business, I know if I went self employed right now I could earn £125 by 6pm. After 6pm however? That's a different story.

I know how to do freelancing, I know how to go about getting work and have a diverse range of skills and services I could market in various ways.

What I don't know is whether or not I would get any significant income in the first couple of months, now I would love to be doing productive stuff but I need to know where I stand and it's all very very vague.

For instance reading your links and doing subsequent research everthing seems to hinge on the term "qualifying renumerative work" which I find very dubious.

If for instance you run a shop is that not renumerative work? I would argue yes, but from what I read what qualifies as "renumerative work" is whether you "should" get paid or if you "hope" to get paid.

If you "hope" to get paid for your work then it's not considered to be renumerative, if you "should" get paid then it is. This doesn't sound very clear cut to me, I can see two people doing the exact same work and having some pen pusher coming to completely different conclusions regarding whether or not the work they do qualifies.

I'm hoping to speak to someone at JC+ next week as I heard about something called NEA which sounds like it could help me cut the chains assuming that's not about to be changed as well.