Dan B

I'm trying to work out whether it is worth me doing ny more work this year

I'm doing a PhD at the moment, which classifies me as a student, therefore untaxable. However, I have been supplimenting my PhD with work for an evetns company. (this is how I afford an impreza).

Last year (April 2001-2) i earn't £6355 from this company, and got taxed £4.10, with NIC Ees £337.20 and NIC Ers £401.27. I was told in July last year that I had been taxed wrong and that this year I would have to pay emergency tax

This year I have earned £4553.70 and been taxed £957.00 with NIC Ees £164.69 and NIC Ers £194.33. So, is it likely that come april i will get some money back, or will I get nothing? If I have gone over the Tax bracket, then **** and I'll carry on working, if I haven't shall I stop working , remain below the tax bracket, and collect at the end of March???

Any help appreciated...

cheers.

carl

What's your tax code for this year?

Dan B

Err, is that really the type of info I should give out on a BBS?

carl

Don't see why not
FWIW mine's 415L (based on getting medical insurance in 2001/02 -- didn't get it in 2002/03 so hopefully my tax code will go up next year).
Standard is 465L, IIRC.

Dan B

Thought you might be able to find all my income details, address etc. Turns out not to be the case. opps.

Any way, its 453L for last year, and BR for this year.

carl

That's the problem then. Speak to the Revenue -- even if you've underpaid it shouldn't be BR. Your employer is taxing you as if you have no personal allowance -- did you submit a P45 or P46 to them at all?

Dan B

What does BR mean?

I submitted a P46 to them, (thats the one with the three questions about this being your only job etc, right?), except I didn't tick any of the boxes, because they didn't apply to me....

the university i am doing my PhD at also lets me supervise undergraduates, for which the university pays me (nothing to do with PhD). This job I consider more important than the other, so I consider this my firsat job. I mentioned this to the finance deptartment at the events company, and I said that none of the options of the P46 apply to me, therefore I'm not ticking any box. they said "fine."

I can just phone up the inland revenue then and ask them whats going on?

carl

BR means 'basic rate' -- i.e. you pay 22% tax and 10% NI on all of your earnings.

The problem is that you have two jobs, and you can only use your ~£4.5k personal allowance on one of them. The other is always taxed at basic rate, then the difference sorted out at the end of the financial year.

So, if the university paid you only £2,500 (which you'd get untaxed), then there's about £2k's-worth of allowance unused. As you've paid basic rate on everything in your second job, you've overpaid and your tax code for next year should be adjusted accordingly.

OTOH, if the university paid you £33k (unlikely, I know), you should have been paying higher rate tax in your second job, but you've only paid basic rate. In this case you've underpaid, and your tax code for next year will be adjusted accordingly.

The simplest way to solve this in the future is to make sure that any job that pays less than a normal personal allowance (£4615) is your 'secondary' job for which you get the BR tax code. Of course if you have two jobs, both of which pay less than £4615 then you're stuffed and will have to keep waiting till the end of the tax year to get it adjusted.

HTH

Dan B

wow... okay, I've only got 800 quid from the uni this year, so in total I will have earned about 5.4K. So I should be taxed 20% on earning over 4.6K, i.e. 20% of £800, £160. I should expect back £800? That would be nice.... some sweet mods can be doone with that!

Dan B

Indeed, and if I told you how much that was there would be some rather pi55ed off people reading it.

carl

Really? What are you doing a PhD in? When I last looked at it (~1997) it was about £10k tax free for a PhD in Astrophysics (equivalent to about £15k salary, I guess). Post-doc positions were paying about £13-£18k then, so it all seemed a bit pointless.
Then, like nearly everyone else on here, I discovered IT

carl

Ooh! Which university are you at? I did a Bachelor's at Kent (long before the Unit for Space Sciences and Astrophysics upped sticks in its entirety to the OU), and a Masters (part-time) at Queen Mary. TBH I was more into orbital dynamics than cosmology.

Doh! Just checked the profile. You're at Herts Uni (commonly known as Hatfield Poly ). IIRC the astronomy bit's in Hertford though (went there for an interview about transferring my QMW course credits there once).

PS: I know about the cost of living -- I live just up the road in Bishop's Stortford

[Edited by carl - 3/4/2003 1:06:29 PM]

Dan B

I've moved up the road to Baldock recently. i could get the same type house for £200 less a month up there. i just have to sit on the A1.... ro take the back roads

The observatory at Hertford is a real credit to the Uni, we've got some good kit there. we got a spectrograph last year which has been stuck on a 16inch meade LX200 with ST9 CCD, nice. There is an open day this saturday as it happens.... 1pm til late (depending on weather)

Cosmology is my favourite

carl

Smart. QMW had a 12" on the roof, but seeing as it's slap bang in the middle of Mile End Road they had to make extensive use of sodium filters
FFS, the sky is actually orange if you look from the roof of the QMW physics building

Cosmology is a bit 'hand-wavey' for me, and the maths is far too complicated. I only like stuff I can run through a numerical simulation

Dan B

Cosmolgy has just become very accurate after the WMAP results were published. The CMB has just been show to fit very well with predicted angular power spectrum harmonics. The first harmonic is at 0.6 degrees, the angle of the hubble horizon at the age and redshift of the big bang. we now know hubbles constant to be 70+/- 2 km/s/Mpc. the best its ever been..... Also, its the most accurate measurement of the temperature fluctutations, supposedly the precusors of superclusters. Very exciting stuff if you're into it

Personally I have to put up with watching stars going around black holes at the centre of AGN's. yawn. Oh, I suppose I better write a thesis soon too

carl

I know -- I read it in New Scientist

Ee, when I were a lad there were two camps of cosmologists: those who believed that the Hubble constant was around 50kms^-1/Mpc and those who believed it was around 100. It seemed to me at the time that 70 looked like a good figure, and had the advantage that it didn't blow any of the observations out of the water (e.g. observing stuff at a distance of 20 billion light years when the universe is only thought to be 15 billion years old).

Dan B

Yeah, that was one of the good ones... "is it 50 or 100? duuuh"

one of my lecturers really took the pi55, i quote:

"and some people think the universe is 9 billion years old. Well, why are stars in globulars 13 billion years old then? Fools."

p.s. New Scientist is "The Sun" of scientific publishing I've even seen **** on page 3 before

carl

I know -- that was the week before last.

Sorry, but being 'out of the loop' these days stuff like 'Nature' is a bit too heavy for me. I like to read articles that don't require me to solve equations

Dan B

carl

Seems about right to me, as you only pay 10% tax and 10% NI on the first £1880 over your personal allowance.

Whether you'll actually 'get it back' or your tax code will be adjusted, I don't know. Contact the revenue soon after the end of the financial year and hassle them for it, or you'll wait forever.

As I said before, you're better off swapping the codes around (i.e. use your personal allowance for the higher paying job), then you won't be out of pocket so much during the year.

Of course the advantage you have is that the annual stipend you get for your PhD studies is totally tax-free. It's not "tax free" in the same way as unemployment benefit (i.e. it counts out of your personal allowance) -- it's completely tax-free

[Edited by carl - 3/4/2003 12:48:33 PM]

Dan B

eer. Astro-physics.... Supermassive black holes to be precise. There is a slightly different scale in the London catchment, which I fall outside of by 3 miles. i.e. if the uni was 3 miles further south I would have an extra 1.9K a year tax free. Of course the cost of living here is exactly the same

I'm no way doing a post doc in the UK, the money in USA is 3 times that...

[Edited by Dan B - 3/4/2003 1:01:50 PM]