Financial Woes

I work a fifty hour week, sometimes night shifts, sometimes painfully early shifts and sometimes evening shifts, and its not enough. I get paid a chunk above minimum wage, but I racked up huge credit card debts during a few months of redundancy, so its now impossible to earn enough.

I was thinking I need to get a job that pays more, or get pay rise at the place I'm at. But with Working Tax Credits, I'm beginning to fear such a think. If I earn more, my tax credits go down, so there's no net benefit, just more work.

Mark Wadsworth covers such a thing here

Don't forget that the income-tax free personal allowance is only £6,475 (and the National Insurance threshold is even lower than that), so you start paying income tax and National Insurance (total 31% of your wages) long before you have reached a level which could be fairly considered to be 'out of poverty'. So the impact of this is the equal and opposite of 'making work pay' and pushes as many back into poverty as Tax Credits claim to lift out.
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There is little correlation between Tax Credits and tax paid, but as ever, let me point out that a single earner claiming the 30-hour Tax Credits rate who is earning £195 a week is paying £23.45 a week in income tax and National Insurance and is, in theory, entitled to £23.14 a week in Tax Credits (TBMT, Table 1.1b).

Raising the Personal Allowance is an issue that both sides of the non-political spectrum can agree on. Its the only thing that'll help my finances at the moment.

Cos changing jobs will only work if I do something that pays a step change more money than what I'm on now, rather than just a little bit more, and give my skills, I'm not going to find such a thing in this part of the country.