Benefits Check Up: 5 mins to get what you're entitled to

Is your family income under $66,350? If so, you may be entitled to benefits and tax-credits. Many are simply unaware of their eligibility, including a million plus low income pensioners who sadly fail to collect their pension credit. Yet it's easy to do a five minute benefit check up, using a special web-calculator for the under and over 60s.

Unsurprisingly the social security system is a nightmare of complexity, so it's impossible to easily summarise exactly who's eligible for payments. Yet it is easy to say who should check; cash may be available for anyone in one or more of the following groups.

• Those with dependent children and a family income less than $58,000, or $66,350 if you have a baby under 1, a disabled child or a large family and you spend a lot on childcare.

 

• Those without children in work earning less than $16,000.

• Those who are out of work.

• Anyone with an illness or disability.

• Carers, guardians, recent parents and the over sixties.

A rather sexy little site Entitledto.co.uk does the work for you: it has a regularly updated calculator that works everything out, in one go, whether you're 22 or 72. It's very simple to use: just input basic details about your personal situation, such as income, council tax bill, and your savings and it reveals what, if any, benefits you're entitled to.

The calculator includes all the main benefits: Working Tax Credit; Council Tax and Housing Benefit; Pension Credit; Child Benefit; Child Trust Fund and Child Tax Credit. It's important to remember, benefits rules do change, so if it's likely you're entitled to benefits then it's worth doing an annual check up.

Entitledto's prime revenue raising comes from selling more advanced and detailed benefits calculators to local authorities. By offering this free calculator it helps build its brand, though actually the founders also seem to genuinely want to help too, and as the technology's already there, it's not too expensive to put it online.

Those people who are fully reliant on benefits and/or struggling for cash should go to a Citizens Advice Bureau or one of the network of Independent Advice Centre for a one-on-one detailed benefits check up. For others, while the entitledto calculator is designed to focus on the main benefits (and tax credits) and only includes those in the calculation, the site itself also points you to information about other benefits, such as Maternity and Paternity Benefits, Carers' Allowance, Disability Living Allowance, Attendance Allowance, Income Support and Job Seekers' Allowance.

Yet there are some more specific entitlements that aren't included, so it's worth scanning the following, to see if they apply.

• Bereavement and Guardian's Payments
  
  Bereavement Allowance is a weekly benefit paying up to $85/week for up to a year after the death of a spouse/civil partner who paid NI contributions. To be eligible you need to be over 45 when they died, but not yet the State Pension age.
  
  There's also a separate one-off bereavement payment of $2,000 tax-free available and separate special allowances for widowed parents bringing up a child(ren) or expecting your late husband's baby.
  
  Guardian's allowance is available for those bringing up a child (or children) because one or both of their parents have died. You must be receiving Child Benefit for the child(ren).

 

• Discretionary Housing Payment
  
  As well as main housing and council tax benefits included by the calculator, each council also has a set budget useable for discretionary housing payments. Qualifying guidelines vary, but if you are entitled to some Housing Benefit you are entitled to apply for a Discretionary Housing Payment.

 

• Employment and Support Allowance (previously called Incapacity Benefit)
  
  This is paid if you are sick/disabled and unable to work (signed off by a Doctor), not getting statutory sick pay and assessed as incapable of work. Those over 20 will usually need to have paid enough National Insurance (NI) contributions to qualify.
  
  This is a political hot potato, as a very large number of people claim, and there are accusations that some abuse the system.

 

• Support for Mortgage Interest
  
  If you have a mortgage, and are struggling to make monthly repayments, this Government benefit can pay the interest for you. If you've savings under $16,000 and in receipt of other benefits you can apply; we've built a full Eligibility Checker.
  
  A couple more schemes are open to homeowners in even deeper trouble; the Homeowner Mortgage Support Scheme can defer mortgage interest payments and then add them onto the capital, to be repaid when you can afford it, and the Mortgage Rescue Scheme takes it a step further still by buying all or part of your home to cut your outstanding borrowing.
  
  For details on all of this, see the full Mortgage Arrears Help guide.

 

• Healthy Start - Milk, fruit and veg vouchers
  
  Healthy Start, a government run scheme, gives $3/week in vouchers ($6/week for babies under 1)for those on Income Support, Income Based Job Seeker's Allowance or Child Tax Credit with children under four or pregnant women. They can be redeemed at most big supermarkets as well as some corner shops, green grocers and market stalls. You can use against milk, fresh fruit and vegetables or infant formula milk.

 

• Education Maintenance Allowance (EMA)
  
  Available to 16-19 year olds, in households with income under $31,000, who decide to stay in further education after their GCSEs, studying at least 12 hours of guided learning per week. Claiming these funds does not affect any other benefits that you receive. Read EMA: Get Paid to Study

A further huge info resource is the Benefits and Tax Credits Chat Forum Board, where with huge kindness a number of Citizens Advice trained people and others have voluntarily helped out answering people's questions.

It's become a great database of questions and answers on everything to do with benefits. Special thanks to Fran for organising it and Ted for his tireless answering. The best place to start is the Benefits and Tax Credits FAQ and the Useful Links section.

You could also check the Grant Grabbing article to see if there are other sources of income that you could be eligable for.

Further note if you are on a low income and have money worries

This site lists lots of ways to help you try and cut costs, but the first place to start is the Debt Problems article. You may have also noticed an influx of adverts offering to wipe out most of your debt in one go when you start an Individual Voluntary Arrangement (IVA). This sounds too good to be true doesn’t it, although this usually means it therefore is, so if you are considering one of these plans please read my Full IVA Guide to find out if this is the best option for you.

Once you've got a good idea of the benefits that you could qualify for it's essential that you act quickly. Benefits start from the day you apply, so it's important to make the first contact as soon as you might be entitled.

Social security benefits can be applied for/claimed either at a Jobcentre Plus or, for people with disabilities or carers via Benefit Enquiry Line on 0800 882200.

Child benefits and tax credits come under the Inland Revenue, which can be called on 0845 300 3900. Council tax and housing benefit is applied for at your local council, and the pensions credit via the pensions service on 0800 99 1234.

 

There's still a stigma to claming benefits in the UK, even with the government's attempt to re-brand them as ‘tax-credits'. Yet for those who shy away from claiming their entitlement, commonly those who worked much of their life, a simple statistic is rather persuasive.

Someone with a typical 40 year working lifespan, earning the roughly average $25,000 salary, would in today's prices pay almost exactly a quarter of a million pounds in tax and national insurance.

Thus rather than seeing social security as a favour from the Government, perhaps understand it's an entitlement contributed to in the good times, and repaid when you've less cash. Of course, many have political views that there should be a different benefits system, or even none at all. Yet having that belief doesn't prevent you from paying taxes, so it shouldn't stop you claiming the reciprocal benefit.

The most disturbing group who fail to claim are pensioners, many of whom are entitled to the Pension credit. Of course any pensioner reading this should be sorted, but some, especially older pensioners are disenfranchised from information due to lack of web access – so if you know someone where that's the case, why not ask them if they've checked out their benefits and if not doing the simple five minute process for them to check they're not missing out.

The amount of benefits available are huge, and of course vary widely with circumstances. A single parent with two children working 35 hours a week to earn $15,000 could be eligible for over $8,000 in benefits. A pensioner couple with a $10,000 income could be eligible for around $6,900 in benefits.

 

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