How I received an £870 Tax Rebate

This post is to help you hopefully gain back some tax that you have paid in previous years.

I’m not going to lie it’s time consuming initially, especially if you don’t have payslips available or have moved jobs often, but it is totally worth it I promise you. Like most things the more you do the quicker you get. So once you’ve done one year of returns the rest are generally quicker as you know how to go about it.

I really do hope you find it helpful and I really hope that you get some rebate in any capacity.

Let’s do a little background on how I got to this position to be able to offer advice out.

In late 2021 I updated the past 5 years of my income tax claims on the government website. I was introduced to this from an article on the Money Saving Expert website by Martin Lewis. He mentioned about how you are able to claim back uniform expenses and that was the prompt I needed to give it a go. This period of my life was when I was super enthusiastic in utilising all options to generate income along with learning as much new things as possible to invest, save and increase the money coming in.

I went through the forms which can be accessed here, and I included two sets of professional registration fees. Alongside this each profession has a flat rate you can claim and the rate you can claim varies, mine was £125.

I went through each year adding both these expenses and let the HMRC calculator do it’s thing in the background whilst I waited patiently at home.

After a few week I received a rebate for £223 for the two years of 2019-2020 and 2020-2021 combined. I was super pumped to get this back because if I hadn’t had made the effort I obviously would have lost it forever. The cheque arrived a few days later which I cashed in and promptly spent it on the holiday I already had planned (not wise and more on this later!).

I was able to go as far back as 2018-2019 but prior to this I was not in the country. From what I understand they rolled the rebate from that year into the next year, and this then cumulated into the total amount I received. If you worked in the UK for the past 5 years paying tax you will be able to claim back the entire time.

Roll now onto the 2021-2022 tax year. I submitted the same information as I did for the other years, the flat expenses rate and the professional fees, but the biggest difference for this tax year was that I didn’t work for 2 and half months. This was the period I was away on a long holiday. So the tax I paid between April 2021 – October 2021 and January 2022 – April 2022 was calculated under the presumption I was working for the entire 12 months. When in reality for November, December and half of January I wasn’t earning.

This allowed for HMRC at the end of the tax year to then recalculate everything.

I arrived back from another holiday at the start of July (2 weeks this time much shorter and normal!) to a letter from HMRC. I expected this letter to be a reminder to complete my Company Tax Return for the travel company I have, so you can imagine how surprised and happy I was to see a rebate from the tax man to the tune of £870.20!

Insane.

I was super stoked.

I went onto their online portal, filled out the information they needed and two days later it was in my bank account.

Now this time I was going to be much more sensible with it.

Premium bonds all the way to top up my Emergency fund. I bought £500 of them today, and will do £370 of them at the end of them month when the balance of my credit cards and salary have all gone through for the month, it’s been a busy 6 weeks of spending and I need the dust to settle to take stock! This will take me to £4,000 by the start of August which is awesome, as I only posted about 2 weeks ago how I just hit 50% of my emergency fund target of £3,000.

It's a real snow ball effect and I will talk about this in the next post. I’m just so happy to see things coming together, for the little actions I have been taking finally having a positive effect. I am in a much better position today than I was 18 months ago. Making smarter choices and giving myself the best opportunities whilst being patient with the changes.

So my advice is:

1/ check out the website where you can hopefully update the information for past 5 years and hopefully get a rebate.

2/ To then use that rebate to either pay off debt, top up emergency fund or invest into your S&S ISA. Don’t buy pointless shit you don’t need!

Good luck my friends and let me know how you get on .