Redundancy and Income support

rio · 7 June 2007 at 11:00AM

It's looks like my husband may be made redundant. I have a question about savings and redundancy money and how we can use it. We currently have about 17k sat in two isa accounts which we are saving specifically to repay back our mortgage. We have paperwork from our financial advisor to prove that that is what the accounts were set up for. Our current mortgage rate expires in August, and we were intending to pay the 17K into the mortgage then to reduce the interest accruing. Can we still do this? Or will income support take the view that we have deliberately reduced our savings? Hubby will get about 20k redundancy so we will have to live off that for a while. Hopefully he will find a job quickly, but if we did have to look at claiming IS a few months down the line would they refuse to help if we had used savings to reduce the mortgage?

cattie · 7 June 2007 at 6:18PM

If you use the money to repay the mortgage in the way you intend then it will be considered intentional deprivation by the DWP & will bar you from claiming income support. They will expect you to let your mortgage run to term, as well as any loans you may have.

As as far as they are concerned there would be no reason for you to use your savings in this way & take it that your sole intention was to dispose of the money to gain entitlement to a means tested benefit.

Savings above £16k mean you can't qualify for income support, but once the savings drop below this figure you should be able to make a valid claim.

Redundancy and Income support

Comments

Confirm your email address to Create Threads and Reply

🚀 Getting Started

Categories

Is this how you want to be seen?

Get our FREE Weekly email full of deals & guides - and it’s spam-free