The law is an ass....
Permit me to ask a question. If I gave you £16,000 - and confiscated all your other money, do you think that you could make a return of £2,000 a year from it? - a return of 13% on your original investment?(for reference - 6% is about the highest that you can obtain from most banks)
Well, apparently according to the UK government, that's the scale of the self-sufficiency expected of anyone who is unemployed, but has any savings in excess of £6,000. Any savings above the upper limit of £16,000 means that you get no government benefits at all, and instantly become inelligable for any further bursaries or low-income support that you might have otherwise qualified for.
Of course, good old Gordon Brown is aware of this - he raised the absolute cut-off limit from £6,000 to £16,000 in last April's budget, but why £16,000? Why not £32,000? Why not £100,000?
Oh, and if you're married, you've only got a total £16,000 limit to share between the two of you. And - for comparisons sake - the average house price in the UK is now nearing £200,000, and over £300,000 if you're anywhere in Greater London.... So, good luck out there...
posted by RichB @ Wednesday, August 09, 2006
2 Comments:
Right... something's annoyed Richie then! I guess the £2000 is council tax is it? Which you'd have to earn on top of things like... rent, electricity, water, food, tea... plus of course, 30% of your earnings will go on income tax too if you're earning above... er, 4600 is it? I can't remember...
Another thing that annoyed me was stamp duty - when you buy your first house, (in fact, any time you buy a house), you'll pay a nice bundle of thousands in tax.
Something's not quite right in how all this tax stuff works, but I don't really have the political knowledge (or passion) to work it out...
And just one more thing... about £30 of my council tax goes towards street lighting in the village of Totternhoe. So multiply that by the number of residents in Totternhoe, which I really don't know, but it's got a couple of streets full of houses...
Now, seriously... there are 5 street lamps in my village...
Gosh, we're all having a good complain aren't we!
Well, we are officially old men now ;-)
Happy Birthday by the way!
Anyway, no the £2000 is made up of about £40 a week jobseekers allowance - so if they reckon you could 'earn' £40 a week from your savings then it's a big fat bottom burp to you... Even more unfortunately though, the major problem is that if you don't qualify for one benefit, you normally don't qualify for any of the others either. So someone with no money at all could be getting £200 a week, whilst someone with a little bit tucked away would be inelligable for anything...
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