I'm a home owner on social and wish to rent a room.

Just a note:
I wasn't sure what section to post this in, maybe a moderator can move it if required please.


Anyway. As everyone knows the Celtic Kitten has come to an end and everyone is loosing there job's left right and centre.

Myself included and my Wife. Both of us are recieving jobseekers allowance and unfortunatley we don't see each other getting work for a while.

The payment insurance on the mortgage helped for the last six months but unfortunatley all good things come to an end at some stage.

Basically, we wish to rent a room to a friend. What we would like to know if anyone could help is:

• If we rent a room would we loose our benifits? And how would we go about it.
• The friend is also on benifit, will they loose benifits.

I suppose the better phrased question on both of those is if we don't loose benifits, will they be reduced for either party?

We have a 4 bedroom house of which obviously we are living in, I noticed that wuestion being asked already. We are also in reciept of a tax relief for the mortgage, will we loose that?

We're not looking to fleece the system, just want to get a helping hand where possible and at the same time help our friend out.

Thanks for your time.

The income from any rent recieved will be assessed as means for JA (it is JA you're both on and not JB?). It does not necessarily mean you will lose all your benefits. See here for how this assesment is done. Your freind will not lose any benefits.

Yikes, plenty on that page. I will have to take a gander in the morning.

Sorry JA yes, I get them mixed up.

I had read there where rent schemes allowed by social but I haven't found any more info on them yet. Though from what you say, I'm assuming they will also be assessed.

Just looking thru`the guide and its amazing how many provisions are made so the benefit claimant can make more money. For example a farmer going for the non contributory old age pension does not have his REPS payment taken as means.This is typically 10k a year,so not talking peanuts here. Of course most of these types of income that are classified as not taken into account when calculating means are there as out and out vote winners.