Benefits Check Up

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.

• Are you eligible?
• Step 1: Five min check up
• Step 2: Other allowances
  • Inc. Free School Meals
• A resource not to miss
• Claiming benefits
• A final thought...
• Size of the Saving
• Related Articles/Discuss

Are you eligible for a financial lifeline?

Are you eligible?

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.

For a full and detailed guide to Tax Credits (money from the state to support those with children or in work but with a low income) see the Tax Credit guide. Plus those with kids, ensure you're not missing help with childcare costs. 100,000s of working parents are missing out on £1,000s of cash, see the Childcare Costs guide for full info.

Step 1: Do a five minute benefits check up

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.

Step 2: Scan the checklist for other allowances

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 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.

State Pension

The Basic State Pension is a government-administered scheme, funded by National Insurance contributions (NICs), to give those who have reached the Government-defined retirement age a guaranteed weekly income, currently just over £95 a week. How much you get depends on the amount of NICs you have built up.

For a full guide on how the pension works, and whether it's worth paying out to boost the amount you get (including a unique calculator), read the State Pension Boosting guide.

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.

Free school meals, clothes and milk

Households earning under £16,040 or on income related benefits can get cash to help with sending their kids to school.

Meals and milk: You can get £340 per year for each school aged child to pay for school lunches and if your council provides free milk, getting free meals makes you eligible for this too. You apply through your local school or council (search for yours or just google "www.yourarea.gov.uk Free School Meals").

Uniforms: Some local councils also help with the cost of school clothing and footwear (maybe offering around £30 for primary and £80 for secondary school gear). Check for details of your local council: Local council finder.

Fruit and Veg: Healthy Start, a government run scheme, gives £3.10/week in vouchers (£6.20/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.

Social Fund Grants and Loans

The Social Fund is made up of several pots of money that can help cover important costs that are hard to pay for out of your regular income. Demand can be high and for some there isn't a bottomless allocation of money, so your circumstances may mean you're not eligable. If you think you qualify do apply though.

Community Care Grant: This is for people with special dificulties such as needing help to stay in their own home, coming out of care or prison or are part of a family under exceptional pressure. It can help pay for certain items or expenses that you cannot afford to pay out of your normal income such as furniture, travel or removal costs. Savings over £500 will affect any payments but you don't have to pay the money back.

Budgeting Loans: Provide help if you need things for your home or other things that you cannot pay for in a lump sum, including clothes and furnishings. Savings over £1,000 will affect any payments and the money needs to be paid back over two years.

Maternity Grant: A one off payment if you've had a baby or adopted in the last three months.

Cold Weather Payments: These are to help with gas and electricity costs during cold weather and are different to Winter Fuel Payments which are made every winter to people over 60 regardless of the temperature.

Funeral Payment: Help towards paying for a funeral such as burial or cremation fees.

Education Maintenance Allowance (EMA)

Available to 16-19 year olds, in households with income under £32,300, 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.

Further resources not to miss

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.

In the current economic climes it’s also sensible for everyone to take a moment to think how they’d be impacted by redudancy; and if possible put a contingency plan in place. See the full Redundacy Guide for hints and tips.

How to get your benefits

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.

A final thought...should benefits be claimed?

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 £16,000 could be eligible for over £6,000 in benefits. A pensioner couple with a £10,000 income could be eligible for around £7,000 in benefits. Other benefits may also be available.