Failed at Napping

Dole life Once they've got you in the system they don't want you to leave. At least not until they've with you down and accepted your worthless existence. I could do with some more money, as could most people, so I looked into how earning some money would effect my benefits. I can earn £20 per week! Wow, a whole £20! Anymore than that would be deducted from my benefits. If I earn enough to replace that benefit then I'll be above the threshold for my carers allowance so would need enough to replace that as well. By then if probably be losing my other benefits as well. The way I work it out I'd need a starting wage of about £21k to be in the same financial situation I'm in now. But then I'd have to add on the costs of going to with (travel, meals, clothes, etc) and I'd be worse off. The chance of going into a new job at the same level as my old job after a break is pretty much non-existent. So this means I'm pretty much stuck on benefits. So is it ...

So far so good. I went back for the meeting with my booklet filled in. The guy there checked through it then proceeded to tell me all about how to apply for jobs through the job centre. Thanks but no thanks. Next step is to apply for carer's allowance and wait. This could be a long wait. Carer's allowance people take about 8 weeks to process new claims apparently. As I am applying for income support I need an income to support, this will be the carer's allowance that my wife was getting. Unfortunately you cant just transfer this from one parent to the other, so she had to cancel it and I had to apply for it. It's going to be a lean few weeks until this is all sorted but as long as I can pay the rent then I'll be happy.

So now that I'm not working it's time to claim some benefits. I've been paying into this system for long enough, it's time to get something back. Housing benefit was easy enough, I was able to do that online and while it seemed like quite a lot of questions I got there in the end. The payments for this have gone up and down and every time you give them some new information it's re-assessed. However, I think I've finally got my head around it and now it's time to apply for income support, or whatever it's called. I figured this would also be pretty straight forward, a quick search online and it seems I can apply over the phone, saving me a trip to the job centre. I phoned up. I was on the phone for about an hour going through a long list of questions. I was quite happy with this and at the end of the call I was given an appointment to speak to someone at the job centre. Not ideal but there are hoops you have to jump through and this was the first. I w...