Free money

If you're married or in a civil partnership, and one of you earns more than 11k and the other earns less (or nothing), then the lower earner can transfer some of their tax allowance to the highest earner.

It's called Marriage Allowance.

Wife and I have just sorted ours. HMRC said we'll be about 200 quid per year better off. And you can back date it to the start of 2015.

You can do it online if you know your NI numbers. Wife forget hers so had to phone up. It was sorted in about 10 minutes.

 

Are you sure? I know there was a scheme for people born before a certain date, but I think this is fairly new, applicable to us younger folk too.

 

I think it is a fairly new allowance . I did it last year and it reduced my tax bill by a couple of hundred.

 

I didn't know this!
Thanks for the headsup

 

Here we go.

https://www.gov.uk/apply-marriage-allowance

 

Indeed. It's not exactly fair, but it's better than nowt.

Consider this. Let's say my salary was 31 grand. Standard tax free earnings allowance is 11 grand so I'd pay basic rate on the other 20 grand. That's 4 grand per year in tax.

Now let's say my wife also worked, but my salary was lower. Let's say we both earn the same at 15.5 grand each. Still the gross annual household income is 31 grand, but now there are two lots of 11k tax allowance, so now the basic rate would be against the 9 grand. So the household income tax would then be less than 2 grand.

The new scheme doesn't fix that, but it's better than nowt.

 

And nowt it was for us when Mrs Scrungee packed in work and we both lived on my early retirement pension on which I paid/still pay tax, although I did 'give' her all my money so there was no tax payable on interest on savings, but ridiculously low interest rates seriously reduced savings from doing that, but the new allowance has helped a bit, although we probably get the same annual savings from coupons clipped from Tesco's magazines. Putting it into context a little further, if we spend an average of £5 one day a week buying 90% off end of day reductions, we save £2,340 p.a., but we try and achieve every saving possible as they all add up to a very considerable amount.

 

Did they go all PC? Or was it more that they realised that the average married man has no allowance?

 

Gets *all* of his wages and the average "wife", gets an "allowance"