FAO self employed people

Thanks mate, unfortunately I'm not building my hopes up.

 

hopefully. If both persons in a household are on PAYE they both qualify for 80% government furlough.

households with one self employed and one PAYE should be no different

 

That should be the case. I'm single myself, but if you pay into the system, you should get it back, if that is both of you, so be it, there are so many imponderables.

We also to look at lots of other people. You could have had a business that went under for no reason other than market forces, say in February & be unemployed now, but have payed loads of tax in previous years.

 

1%?
According to the news - at one point yesterday there were 100,000 people going through the online ID process.

it’s normally less than 10,000 per day.

 

This is in no way excusing the government (never voted Tory , hate BoJo), and I have every respect for the self employed (been there myself for many years).

but the early measures chosen by the government were quick wins (if you can call mobilising thousands of staff to change roles quick), they chose the easy strategies to implement in order to help most people quickest.

I’d like to hear someone come up with an easy way to pay the self employed a reasonable amount of cash.

furlough is a simple process, a UC claim isn’t, but how do you make a fair calculation of what a self employed person would earn and what mechanism is there to pay it?

 

A lot of self employed people will be construction workers who will have had 20% stopped from there wages every week. It's's nearly the end of the tax year so could it be possible to use the tax already paid to help them/me out?

 

I don’t know the ins and outs but hopefully the government announcement yesterday will help you.

but it’s not as simple as giving you your money back, apart from anything else, you couldn’t live on it

 

The payments to self employed was never going to be easy.
Those that play it straight and declare everything will be understandably frustrated as they have paid their dues and now, rightly, feel that they deserve assistance.
But, in my line of work, I know a LOT of self employed tradespeople. A lot of these are friends, so I am not being two faced here. But, regular conversations, amongst them, are to brag how little tax they pay, and coming out with statements like ‘as far as the taxman’s concerned, I only earned 9 grand last year’.
So if financial assistance is based on declared earnings, many will now be regretting their decision to limit their declared earnings.
Just to stress though, I do not blame them entirely. If, for example, a builder says he will build you a garden wall for a grand cash, or its £1200 if you pay cheque or bank transfer, you the householder, are going to take the £200 saving and the builder gets his grand choose what.

 

But the builder should not be offering two different prices to the homeowner. By doing so he is purely attempting to defraud the country so he has to take 100% of the blame

 

I don’t disagree, I am just being careful with my words so as not to offend anyone in this bracket.
But, let me give you a very real example, and this is perfectly true.
Someone I know, very well, earns £1000 per week - cash, as a tradesman (can’t explain how his employer lays his hands on cash as that is difficult now days).
Now, from his grand, he declares nothing. No tax, no NI, no pension, nothing. His wife works part time and they have two school age kids, so they get family tax credits at £550 a month. So for every tenner he earns, about 12 quid lands in his pocket.
Now I am employed, so like most, for every tenner I earn I have deductions of tax, national Insurance and pension, so less than 7 quid of my tenner earned lands in my pocket.

There will be a hell of a lot of very nervous self employed right now, wishing they’d played it straight. Just hope they’ve managed to tuck a few bob under the mattress.

 

I don't apologise for having no sympathy whatsoever for people like that.

 

There will be and I do know some but I honestly do not care one bit. I would rejoice if they had to sell their nice cars, cancel their sky and stop their regular luxury holidays and ended up in hardship like millions of other people have to endure week in week out. They have stolen for years and years. People don't use the word stolen because they don't want to acknowledge what they or their own friends and family are doing but let's be honest it is theft.

As for those who have been honest and done the right thing I hope they're protected and get the help they need

I had some work done recently and I was given three different quotes by the same person depending on how I wanted to pay. Utterly ridiculous.

 

I think you and I sing of the same hymn sheet.
I just word things a bit more delicately than you.
Can’t knock a bit of good old straight talking though.

 

Yes I definitely think we agree.

The way I see it is that if someone reads it and thinks 'omg he's talking about me. I'm offended' then good because if they recognise themselves from my posts then I AM talking to them.
If someone reads it and doesn't think it's about them but are still offended then I have to ask them why? They are a victim just like we are.

That's why I don't bother being diplomatic.

 

If you get something cheaper knowing its not going through the books you have some responsibility too.

 

Yes you have but that's not to reduce the builders responsibility for their own fiddling

 

If a tradesman offers me 2 quotes or demands cash, I don't use that tradesman.

If they tell me they prefer cash, that's fine, but I'm paying by bank transfer.

 

Any one is

The big problem with the construction industry is greed from top to bottom customers included, everybody wants what's best for them.
It's a boom and bust industry which feeds the greed even more.

 

it was all going so well too! I agreed with every word you had written until this.

If you pay anyone in cash knowing they have told you it’s cheaper that way as he won’t be putting it through the books you are just a complicit in the fraud as they are. It didn’t reduce their fraud either but 2 wrongs do not make only 1 side liable.