It's certainly better than the other way round.

The first year Trump’s “tax cuts” came into effect, we went from getting a $3k refund to owing over $3k so basically his “tax cut” cost us $6k/year 😞

And I would so much prefer dealing with the Inland Revenue: they are so polite and, generally, competent. Our Inland Revenue Service is a terrible bureaucracy: inefficient, rude, and it’s like shouting into the void to get anything done 😐

I thought that Trump tax cut was only for people who already had loads of money?

@U052852ES The permanent part was, yes. But he added temporary adjustments to everyone’s withholdings and many people’s taxes did go down (for the first year, back in 2017/8) but then the cut goes away a little each year for the people who needed it most. We normally get a refund from both Federal and State so it was a bit of a shock to suddenly owe $6k — I could have understood it just eating away at our refund year-on-year…

seems all rather complicated. And I am allergic to complicated things.

America is not for you then, @U052852ES 🙂 It has world-class bureaucracy! 🙂

There is plenty of bureaucracy here... there is no escape I suspect

Thank you - I didn't realise I had to re-do it. I don't actually recall anything happening as a result of when I did it the last time

Did your tax code change?

I got a notification to say it had (also, you can log into the website with your universal tax number to see)

I don't remember it changing, but I may have just forgotten

So, the standard UK standard tax code is 1257L, which is the £12,570 standard personal allowance

after the change, I now have 1288L which is £12,880 allowance.

Mine was 1250L in March 2020, and was still 1250L in October 2020

Looks like you may be owed some money!

I don't have access to anything more recent than that, due to another saga

12880 - 12500 = £380. It looks like they refunded me for £170/month. 40% of £380 is £152

(Is 40% a relevant number? I may just be making that up)

So far I've received a cheque, with a letter saying that the calculations would come in a separate letter

But I haven't been given a new tax code

Try to apply for it, you have to do it every year. If that doesn't work, give them a bell 🙂

Yeah, I re-did it just now

One of the questions is about if you started working from home because of covid, which is still true until the end of June. I guess the answer to that will be no after that

I don't think it matters at all. It's for statistics. You could be working from home simply because you've negogiated that with your work, to put your home as your primary place of work

Could be that the company you work for is also 100% remote!, so that is just for statistical gathering

🤞

AWS can be black magic is my experience

definitely black magic i found the solution in the end - it turned out that if your RDS instance is in a private VPC then there is another step, which was conveniently omitted from all the AWS docs on how to enable S3 access for RDS 😬 . stackoverflow thankfully plugged the gap, but it took me an age to work through all the AWS routes to finally figure out none of them worked

Sometimes AWS is too secure