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After many years of being told one thing by Child Maintenance staff, only to be told the opposite by another member of their staff, regarding various issues. I would like to ask if anyone has had experience in dealing with them regarding the inclusion of lump sum payments in to a personal pension, when it comes to child maintenance assessments. Although I make regular monthly payments in to my personal pension, which they do acknowledge, they have told me that any additional lump sums that I pay in to my personal pension will not be taken into account when it comes to my annual assessment. Initially, I can only find high level statements, saying that they use taxable income less pension contributions. This seems black and white on the surface but as I am well aware, nothing is black and white when it comes to child Maintenance. I am waiting for them to come back to me with the legislation, stating that personal lump sum payments are not included in their calculations.
If anyone has experience of this issue, I would be very interested to hear of your experiences.
So your pensionable contributions are not included that is correct, but its averaged out over the year, if you make a one off contribution, then it will have to reduce your gross income by more than 25% over a 12 weeks period for you to apply for a reduction, and even then they may not approve.
I would seriously look at the way you pay into a pension. Monthly contributions are great for this, and you can in certain ways control your income over the year with pension contributions. Each annual assesment they will take into account the new earnings figure, which will be lower if you have increased monthly contributions.
If i were you I would forget about the lump sum if you can and increase monthly payments that will be reflected on your end of year.
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