Journal #8366

£900 for taxes? What the actual fuck?

Do IT and similar sector companies from UK hire people based on their past or based on a technical test? If it is the latter, how do they treat immigrants?

I'm asking for a personal opinion because in the past months we've been all witnesses to an unreasonable hatred towards the eastern block of Europe, and I'm just curious how is the situation perceived now.

You think that's bad?
Last time I was in Scotland I had to leave before I could bring an Irn Bru bottle back to the shop for the 15p, so I had my granddad do it.

He never gave me the 15p, the cheap bastard.

But seriously, that's pretty unlucky. The best you can do is wait for things to get better again. You're still young, and fairly skilled, so you might get even better offers in future when you're able to accept them.

Striker, freelancers and self employed folk pay tax manually, whereas it's automatically deducted from pay in a permanent job. I was below a certain earning threshold, so I didn't pay much at all, but in December i went over the threshold line without realising it, so come April (the start of the new financial year because reason) I suddenly had to pay more tax for all my 2013 earnings that were previously on a lower payment tier due to being under the threshold. It's not actually a ludicrous amount for a whole year - it's just because it all came at once because I didn't know I needed to pay it, thinking I was still under the threshold.

IT jobs tend to care more about qualifications than skill, which i dislike. One of the reasons I like TV work so much is that they tend to employ you based on experience and a good showreel rather than ability to pass an exam at school. I left school at 16 which is really early in the UK, and I'd probably be stuck doing menial labour or serving people in McDonalds because of it, were it not for the creative industries' ability to look beyond qualifications.

I don't know how the immigration part would come into it, though. There's certainly an air of the old-fashioned 'COMING OVER HERE TAKING OUR JOBS' crap amongst the lower classes who are too lazy to actually go out and get jobs anyway (then blame their unemployment on immigrants) but I think in a professional environment it wouldn't be held against you at all. If you can prove you've got the talent, I think you'd get the job, but getting an interview without a recognisable uni or past experience on your resume could be difficult.

TJB, it used to be 20p. How times have changed ;_;

You think 900GBP is a massive tax bill? My tax bill for last year was double that
I did a few largish jobs on the side of my full-time job and that knocked me up a tax bracket, plus it also increased the mandatory payment on my student loan :/

Did you have to pay it all at once, though? Mine is on top of what I've already paid - it's the excess from moving to the higher bracket.

Uni and college education is free in Scotland, so my student loan was only ~£1500 which was an optional allowance I signed up for, thankfully already paid back in full.

I could always use more money but I prefer the security of permanent full-time work.

Higher education in Australia is heavily subsidised, but you still have to pay. My loan ended up being about $20k for 3 years of full-time study. It's done through the government and it's a low interest loan, so that's better than nothing I guess
I haven't paid the tax bill yet, but yes, I will have to pay it all at once. It's on top of the tax I've already paid through my employer.

Also, I'm somewhat with Urby. I like security, and I also like having a long-term project and being able to improve and evolve it over the years. I could do contract work, but there's not really any opportunity to become attached to a project, you just do it and move onto the next one. That's not much fun for me.

Obviously it's different for every profession, there's probably not many long-running, evolving projects that exist in your industry, Archie.

Yikes that's a lot of dolla. Sounds like your tax thing is the same as mine, but even more which is a frightening concept.

I got a job in IT purely from knowing people. I am in school for it as well, but i can say i learned more from the job in the last month than i have going to uni.
But yeah, not every one knows a lot of folk.

Man that sucks! ='(

Maybe make your dayjob something more flexible, so you can take advantage of the juicy freelance work?

What that flexible/permanent job is, i don't know, but even something like waiting tables at a fancy restaurant, you can make enough working the weekends and odd days to get by, during the slow times

And taxes, don't get me started. Half of my friends had great small businesses that were crushed out of existence due to gestapo enforcement taxes in New York State, e.g., if you run a cash business, prepare to be audited every year...

Wait a minute, who regulates freelancing? How does the government know you are getting money for freelance work?
Damn it I didn't know capitalism is so hard. I'm still a noob when it comes to finances.

No one, at least where i live. People are more than happy to pay you in dirty money, which i prefer anyway.

Full time jobs do offer security, but they sure wear you out which doesn't leave much energy for other projects. And at roughly twenty percent income tax in the U.S. before bills and expenses you're already hit pretty hard.

My employer doesn't deduct taxes from my pay so I have to manually set aside twenty percent each paycheck.

Captain has a good idea, you can bank waiting tables with such little effort. Take it from me.

Unfortunately, it's just the way it is with freelancing. Until you've established yourself as a bankable name, there will always be that trepidation that comes with the comparative lack of job security.

In terms of student loans: yes, Pebs' amount was a lot (mine was a little higher), but it's taken so gradually and slowly out of your taxable income, you barely notice it. I feel sorry for those who have to go through the US education system and suffer crippling debt as a result. We only start repaying our student loans when we actually make an income: it's literally the easiest and stress-free loan there is.

What does Irn Bru taste like?

Scotland.

Striker; you do yourself. You declare how much you have earned to the government and pay appropriate taxes. If you don't and they find out you get in trouble with the law (tm)

Tax planning is hard when you don't have a steady income. I always put away enough money to cover breaking a tax bracket, just in case.

Thank god I am still in school

I kinda forgot you freelanced. I wish I was as successful as you were. Do yourself the biggest justice ever and never come to America looking for big work. It's not here, Americans can't even get American jobs.

When I started out, I had no experience for design stuff so I freelanced. Just found out the other day that I freelanced so much that I'm over qualified for most of the jobs I can handle short of a position at a gaming studio. YET I don't have enough actual gaming experience or a strong enough portfolio to get into a studio. I'm am quite perfectly fucked. My usual pool of clients that I did freelance for dried up this year so nothing has progressed. I'm basically living off of the good will of others and I feel absolutely awful. I didn't mean to spill this all over your journal, I'm just having some trouble sorting it out.

Either way, I wish you the absolute best. I don't know what kind of area you live in, but at least you have skills that are more widely useful than mine being in media stuff. Best of luck to ya.

Discostu: Urby's answer is pretty spot on, but I went on Yahoo Answers to try to provide you with a more accurate description. Here's what I found:

"It's a really hard flavour to describe but it tastes amazing."
"It tastes like Scottish rust."
"it has a hint of the mild tingle you get, when you try a 9v battery with your tongue"
"made from the finest Scottish water and triple filtered through highlanders underpants to give it body"
"Pure nectar big man."
"It's like liquid heaven....lol..... and it tastes better from a glass bottle"
"Girders"
"The ultimate hangover cure. Tastes best when consumed directly from a 750ml glass bottle."
"Another one of Scotland's many national identities."
"Scotland is the only country in the world that produces a soft drink that outsells Coca Cola."

Rimmy: Don't be sad, bruv. You went to college to study the field you want to work in, right? Do what I did - figure out what industry skill the colleges aren't teaching and self-learn that. The internet provides free education, so if you're worried your portfolio isn't unique enough, learn the edge that will make it shine. In my case, I went to college to study TV production - learning good skills in camera operation, editing, sound recording and lighting. What I didn't learn was VFX. So I went on Youtube and spent a year learning that and now it's my number one calling card.

Rim, you have some absolutely incredible works here as a portfolio.
Collect them all and slap them into a presentable website, hunt for level design jobs?

You're more than capable