Maybe only council tax payers will understand but basically::::

I'm a student, and I work part time. My boyfriend works full time. I'm exempt from paying council tax but because we live together he gets a 25% discount and we BOTH pay the tax which is going to be 119 pounds every month next year and was 160 POUNDS every month! last year, and I pay half of it even though I'm really struggling just to pay my half of the rent and bills shopping etc.
ANYWAY now it turns out that he miscalculated some amount we had to pay and has been hiding the fact that they now want him(us) to pay 252 pounds on top of the ordinary amount next month... I can't afford this!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! His daughter is coming over at the end of this month and he's promised her we'll bring her out and go to al these places with her which is all going to cost money too on top of this tax issue...
I'm pulling my hair out about it and I ended up calling him up at work and shouting at him that I'm not paying the council tax and he can pay it on his own...and he's pissed off.
It;s all in his name... Is it fair that I pay half of it? Am I being a bitch?! If they turn this thing into an income tax in Scotland he'll have to pay it on his own anyway...... He expects me to pay this then hides the bills from me basically and seems to resent me spending my money on myself at all if I get clothes or anything which is RARE because I'm so broke...???!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I don't know what to do.

I feel so middle aged arguing about money.

Arguing about money sucks. I'm sorry that you are doing it.

It seems kinda fucked to me that he is getting a discount on the tax because you live there and asking you to pay it. On the other hand, sometimes it is best for couples to just split every single bill in half...to avoid resentment (I pay for everything, etc.).

You should probably talk to him calmly and let him know that you are much more strapped than he is and that minimally, you need to have advance warning if the bill is going to skyrocket...because you can't pull money out of your wazoo all the time.

OR, you could hit him with a rolling pin. Because if all else fails, that'll probably learn him.

this is a good idea.

£250 is a considerable chunk of cash. If you're able to help him pay it when the time comes, you could always do so out of kindness or whatever, but if the law exempts you from paying council tax because it's assumed that you don't have much money, it's kind of bizarre that he's expecting you to help pay his share, when he's working full time. DOes he think it's unfair that you're not obliged to pay council tax? Does he lay a guilt trip on you for it?

As for his daughter, well... you're not her mother. And you're broke. It's only fair that he pays for the excursions, especially if he was the one who promised them to her.

I am a student too and pay half our council tax because I think it's fair. And if I were in your situation I'd probably pay half of what's been miscalculated, but my bf&I have a very "what's mine is yours" relationship and it works both ways. Now the real question is: how did your bf end up with council tax debts? Cause the bills are usually pretty clear and tell you exactly what you have to pay month by month.

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now that I know that I'm breaking to pieces
I'll pull out my heart and I'll feed it to anyone.

i was wondering this too. 252 quid is a hell of a lot to have to pay all of a sudden, unless the bills from the last few months haven't been paid in full.

RAHHHHHHH

girrrl should be exciting

make u like an animal

kiss kiss her and kiss her

nothing else should matter but being close to her

I would probably get away with it too I'm on my period which is probably escalating things x a zillion. I've kind of calmed down a bit and just waiting for him to come home so I can tell him calmly I really can't afford to pay it out of the blue. If he's brave enough to come home...

No no he doesn't think it's unfair but I think because I chose to live here (in Ireland we don't pay council tax just income tax) and just now in a text he's pointed out he pays things like tv license on his own and helps me out when I run out of money he thinks it's fair that we share and I agree I think as long as I know what we're paying and it's not extortionate.
And his daughter I'm stressing out about just because it's the first time she's visited us instead of us visiting her so I want everything to be perfect too and want to be able to do things with her, he really doesn't expect me to pay for anything with her but I don't want her to be disappointed at all or bored or want to go home. wah this is just really really bad timing .

We have the same kind of relationship really which is why I pay the bills but just this came as a surprise...and as I was saying before I'm on my period and really strung out so I flipped out when the council tax person called maybe mostly because of that. The reason we have to pay it is because when we first moved in, the letting agents told us they had passed on our info to the council tax people and the way they put it to us was like our council tax was included in the rent (which is almost 600 pounds a month on its own for a 1 bdrm flat) so for the first couple of months it wasn't paid because they never wrote to us or sent us a payment card or anything and we just took it for granted that it was all paid in the rent through the letting agents (how naive we were ! ) until we got a letter asking us to pay the whole 6 months up front and he sorted it out with them to pay it off every month with the following 6 months as we went along but it took them another 3 months to put on the 25% discount and somewhere in between all of that calculations got muddled, he fucked up which he admits now and we ended up with this arrears thing that they're asking us to pay next month.....

I might be alone in feeing this way, but I think it's fair that you usually split the council tax bills down the middle.

I'm in the same situation as you. I'm a student and my other half isn't, so the household get the 25% "lone occupant" discount but I accept that it is my choice to live with him (rather than alone, where I'd pay nothing) and I use the council services just as he does, and thus I take half of the council tax burden. Anything else would seem selfish, to me.

Has he explained to you how he cocked up with it?

In any case, I think you should at least do your best to pay (your share of) the £250, even if it means having him pay it and you repaying him over the course of a few months. But it sounds like he needs explained to him that he needs to get shit right, and right first time, 1/ because you're a student and you can't just make money appear from nowhere if something goes wrong, and 2/ because you need to be able to spread these costs over the year. Tell him so.

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Deux hommes font une promenade amicale. L'un des deux porte un parapluie à son bras.
Il se met à pleuvoir. L'homme n'ouvre pas son parapluie et l'autre lui demande pourquoi.
- Parce que ça ne servirait à rien, lui répond son ami. Il est plein de trous.
- Alors, pourquoi l'as-tu pris?
- Parce que je ne pensais pas qu'il pleuvrait.

No he hasn't explained how he messed it up he hasn't come home from work yet so when he comes home I'm hoping he has some kind of explanation... I'm confused by it all it's been really confusing because I'm not used to council tax and don't understand why you have to pay it because our tax system at home is completely different to here and because of the whole mixup when we moved in so it's something that bothers me anyway without all this crap but I pay it because I'm frightened he'll have to go to jail if we don't. I think maybe you're right even though it was his mistake I think we're going to have to either sort something out where I pay him back in bits over a couple of months or I pay for his half of something next time I get paid , or something along those lines but there's no way I can just pay this in one go + ordinary council tax payments.
Plus I'm still pissed off that he's fucked it up somehow and for some reason didn't just come out and tell me because I found a letter from 25th Feb saying he owes this money. I'm sure it's because he was convinced he didn't owe them that amount and didn't want me to get stressed about it but I don't know how he figured that out and I don't like being kept in the dark...
We're going to have to have a talk .
grr

Council Tax is the half-arsed knock-off of the Community Charge (aka the 'Poll Tax'), a tax that was was introduced by the Thatcher government in the late 80s that was so retarded and unfair that it actually provoked street riots. Council Tax is only slightly less stupid but managed to swing in the complete opposite direction. It's a pretty shitty system and no wonder it causes arguments like these.

I think he's being a bit of a twat as well. You have to understand that LEGALLY you are a non-person as far as this tax is concerned because of your student status, and you're being nice by helping out. Personally I'd say paying 25% of the full amount is fair, which means he's paying the same as if you were both working.

Also, this demand for money is pretty sudden. CT normally have decent payment plans and personally I've pissed them around quite a bit before settling bills. I take it your place is a pretty decent sized house as £160 a month already sounds like quite a lot?

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His last request was a bulletproof vest or a god

Considering he already lives there, and you are a student so if you lived anywhere else you'd pay no council tax, I wouldn't want to pay it at all. I am completely cover my own back money wise though. I hate arguing over money, ergo I consider my expenses to be my expenses, and my boyfriend's my boyfriend's. So for example he lives on the other side of London to me and I drive daily to see him. He very rarely comes over to see me because we are late night people and its 19 stops on the tube and about 5 years on the nightbus, whilst I can do the drive in 25 minutes. He keeps volunteering to chip in towards my fuel but I won't let him- cause you know its my choice to have a car etc so it should be my responsibility to pay for it. Likewise, I would never dream of letting him buy me dinner, nor would I ever buy it for him. Therefore I frankly consider it harsh of your boyfriend to charge you half of something (and like someone said, he is already getting the advantage of your discount) for something that should be free for you.

BTW, I'm noticing a few people, including the OP, are getting this wrong: technically the 25% is not her discount (a discount on account of her being a student). He'd have had the discount already, before she moved in, as long as he lived alone.

The discount is a sole occupants discount for households with only one person in them. Because students can claim exemption from paying council tax, they don't count towards the number of people in the household so the household, like before I assume, still only has "one person" in it for council tax purposes.

Forgive the pedantry.

And even if it was a "student discount", the argument that the discount should constitute her "contribution" towards the council tax is weak anyway.

I said earlier that I accept that I pay half of ours since I made the choice to move in with someone who'd have to pay it, but a good argument against this is that the exemption exists for a reason - because students could do without the extra expense. So for him to expect you to pay it is a bit unfair, especially since he might be better off with other things such as utilities and perhaps rent. But it's certainly kind of you to pay your share, as you would with everything else. That's how I see it.

__________________
Deux hommes font une promenade amicale. L'un des deux porte un parapluie à son bras.
Il se met à pleuvoir. L'homme n'ouvre pas son parapluie et l'autre lui demande pourquoi.
- Parce que ça ne servirait à rien, lui répond son ami. Il est plein de trous.
- Alors, pourquoi l'as-tu pris?
- Parce que je ne pensais pas qu'il pleuvrait.

Black Mambo you're right, the confusion is my fault because I call it a student discount because of my complete retardedness when it comes to all of this and I tend to make it more and more muddled and confusing for myself. I basically don't exist so he's a single person with a 25% discount for living alone, or living with a nonentity like me.

We sorted out his mistake which was an easy(?) but stupid one to make: basically he calculated the student discount for the amount that we were supposed to have paid the 6 months or so we thought the tax was in our rent (because it is included in some rents but apparently not ours)minused the amount we had already paid, and then added the entire amount for the rest of all the months we were living here last year and then he stupidly started minusing all of the receipts of payments we've made and it looked like we had paid 3 pounds more than we were actually supposed to have somehow... when really he was in effect minusing the amount we had initially paid twice.......... Please don't think we're stupid because we're crap at adding and subtracting and keeping track of numbers , it's just not something either of us can comfortably think about for a long time without breaking down in tears with the logic and greyness of it allll....well sometimes numbers are fun and magical I don't know just not in council tax or bills
ANYWAYs he came home last night really upset about it and said sorry and sat down and worked out where he'd gone wrong and he's emailed the council tax people to apologise and has asked them if we can spread it across our monthly payments with this years council tax...which hopefully should be going down because we should be moving at the end of April. So, hopefully they'll agree to that.
I'm going to help him pay it because yeah I chose to live with him and not in Halls or on my own and like I said he helps me out with things so I will help him pay it. I'm really just angry about the stupidity of it all and the whole idea of paying it at all. It's a pain in the head. I hope they get rid of it but the new tax probably won't be any better.

meh.

I'm not too up on my UK tax laws, but...

Arguing about money is just inevitable when you live with someone, it doesn't mean you're middle-aged. Basically, my short answer/ proposed solution is:

You were suprised by the bill; he didn't tell you about it so you couldn't prepare. Apologize for yelling at him at work and explain that you're just super-freaked out about it (it's just for fairness; no one wants to be yelled at by their luvah at work). Then offer to pay a certain amount, and explain why you feel that you shouldn't have to pay all of it b/c of the whole taxes thing PLUS you weren't told the truth, or you would have reacted differently. It doesn't have to be the truth, mind, but it pulls you out of the argument in a positive way because you're (a) apologizing, (b) just concerned about the situation and confused and needing more fiscal honesty and (c) looking like you'd like to find a solution and compromise.

I don't think it's fair for you to pay all those taxes, as you're a student and he's the one making the money. Also, I have a friend who's in a similar spot with a rent hike - she's working and going to school but her boyfriend is out of school making bank. She feels he should pick up the rent increase. There was about a week of tension before they agreed to her compromise (she pays for more groceries, and she had to apologize for causing a bad moment about it at a family dinner), so best of luck.

Thanks oceanpony. I did apologise for shouting at him when he was at work because it was out of order I know. Hope your friend has her situation sorted now too.

wtf is council tax

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