ATAR Notes: Forum
General Discussion => General Discussion Boards => Employment and Careers => Topic started by: Ethereal on February 28, 2020, 08:57:43 pm
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Hey everyone. I'm in a predicament at the moment.
I'm currently on youth allowance and am receiving payments every fortnight. The thing is with centrelink, is that you can't get a (tax) paying job otherwise you won't get paid youth allowance. You could opt for cash-in-hand work but it gets messy and can get risky as well. The payments I receive right now are approx equivalent to a 16 year old working 10 hours a week.
I currently don't have a job, but I need one for experience. However, if I were to get a tax-paying job, like Maccas for example, I'm quite sure I'd be put on casual and am risking quite heavily the possibility of getting 1 shift a week for example (one of my mates gets a 3 hour shift at work every week), which is shit as it's not sustainable and I'm better off getting youth allowance payments anyways. Cash-in-hand work is out of the picture.
What can I do right now? I'm a jaffy so I have approx 5 years until I would get a full-time job. Do I just endure no working experience for 5 years?
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Hey,
I'm not sure if there's something unusual about your situation but generally you can work on youth allowance, it's just that your payment gets reduced depending on how much you earn over a certain threshold. You would also only be paying taxing if you earn over a threshold too so. I'm not sure if this is new information for you but I hope it can help ease some of your concerns.
Best of luck!
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Hey,
I'm not sure if there's something unusual about your situation but generally you can work on youth allowance, it's just that your payment gets reduced depending on how much you earn over a certain threshold. You would also only be paying taxing if you earn over a threshold too so. I'm not sure if this is new information for you but I hope it can help ease some of your concerns.
Best of luck!
Thanks for your reply.
Yes, I did know about the threshold. But I thought that if you get a tax-paying job, like Maccas, Kmart, Coles; the big companies, then you won't be eligible for youth allowance.
Hm. I thought you couldn't work at all in order to be eligible for youth allowance, so does this mean that anyone who's already working and, given they meet the requirements of YA, be eligible to get it? This is all new to me.
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Hey,
As Bri said, you definitely can earn money whilst on youth allowance. This page details how it'll affect your payments https://www.servicesaustralia.gov.au/individuals/services/centrelink/austudy/how-much-you-can-get/personal-income-test
You probably also have some credit, centrelink averages out work income so if you haven't been getting income from work you'll have a higher limit for your earning before it'll reduce your payments (to see how much you have, go to centrelink -> payments and claims -> my payments and scroll down until you see the section that says student income bank, if you're a first year it won't be much).
does this mean that anyone who's already working and, given they meet the requirements of YA, be eligible to get it? This is all new to me.
Yep. There's a maximum earning amount, and it's also possible to have your payment reduced to 0 before you hit that amount if you have parental income that's reducing your payments. Also worth noting that you can be getting 0 in payments due to income for quite a few weeks (i think 12 maybe?) before they'll cancel your payment entirely.
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Haha you're like this government's favourite person!!
All the above, but what I will add is the tax threshold in Australia is about $18k p.a.
That means you need to be making over $18k a year in gross earnings before you have to pay tax. For minimum wage you would have to be working like 18 hours a week.
So go out and work, I'm sure you'll find many others are x