Government doesn't want the mother to stay at home.

HappySad

Oh I see :-)

jellyhead

i read that you can't get the surestart based on the extra money for the baby being under one - if you have a baby they double the amount you're allowed to get before you can claim the SS grant, i think that makes sense, just come back from holiday, got no sleep at all lol!

glad you got 2 lots of surestart :-) i don't think i could get the surestart even if they took into account the extra thousand we're not getting due to only one of us being at work - my husband has a company car so even though we pay lots of tax for it and have a much lower take-home, they add all that money back on again when working out our tax credits entitlement and say our income is a few thousand more than it actually is. it doesn't make sense to me, surely if somebody is paying 3 thousand in tax and taking home 3 thousand less take-home than somebody without the company car they are already being financially penalised for having the car, i don't know why they add it on again when working out what tax credits to give you ... so somebody on 24 thousand with a company car worth 3 thousand a year on the P11 or whatever it is is paying 3 thousand extra in tax per year but then tax credits base the assessment on an income of 27 thousand, not 24. so they're paying twice, in effect.

gingerdad

My oh is a sahm, we used to live on the isle of man, there you can still combine your allowances. it meant i could earn nearly 24k before we paid any tax. we moved back here 4 years ago and have been about 4k per year worse off. but my main gripe is with the crap tax credit system. it seems not to work for us, we haven't had a payment for 2.5 years beacuse they over paid us. we will get the next payment in 07.

I think the tax credit system is thier just to employ people, and lots of them who don't seem to have a clue, it would be much simplier to allow combining of tax allowances and some similiar system for single parents.

but you only need to look at the budget statement from the uk (lots of books) against the 4 page isle of man one

Gordon brown just seems to want to complicate things beyond all belief.

Moan over

stressedoutmother

OMG there was nothing on the surestart from to indicate that the CTC award over the minimum could not be due to a child under one. Maybe it changed since I did it (babies are now 16 months old). Maybe too many people were claiming in this way. I was just so elated to finally be entitled to something! Having been a SAHM since 2000 and with 2 kids already, I felt pretty cheated to be getting only the minimum child tax credit...

I agree with Jellyhead about the company car thing. It is ridiculous. My husband's an engineer and has to have transport for his job so we get this car value taken into account too.

jellyhead

didn't they check to see if you were entitled to it? if you weren't it's not really your fault, i can't make head nor tail of my tax credits award and certainly wouldn't be able to say if i get more than the family element! maybe if it was a new claim for my first child it would be obviuos, but it's not, i have a child already and they made an overpayment a year or 2 ago that they are claiming back gradually in all kinds of ways, changing the amounts from one day to the next for no reason. my award just gives a child tax credit amount, nowhere are the words family element mentioned. the surestart form now says if you get more than 548, or more than 1096 if you have a child under one - again that's misleading because unless your baby is born in april you're going to get the baby element spread out over 2 tax years, so some people will be getting less than 1096 due to their baby being born at a later point in the tax year but might still be entitled to the SS grant because they earn below the cutoff. if that makes sense lol! the award notices don't say you will get X amount of family element, X amount of baby element, X amount of whatever the other elements are called. i don't know why not, how hard could it be to make that information available? i can't even work mine out based on what they tell you they'll be giving you next year, and when it changes after baby reaches a year because i can't work out the overpayments that they're claiming back. they give a figure i'll be getting after baby is one but it doesn't make sense, or say how much of my overpayment is taken from it ... sigh ... i have a degree and i can't work it out. my husband took some of our award notices into work and the entire accounts department were stumped, they didn't have a clue either. i bet 99 percent of the country would struggle to work out if they were entitled to the SS grant or not, so if you did claim it in error it's hardly your fault ...