Employment Advice Needed Please.

[Victoria.]

Hello,

I'm hoping I can get some advice for a work dilemma I have.

I currently work 16 hours a week for an employer I've been with for over 10 years, he cant offer me anymore hours then that. Money has been a bit of a struggle lately and I now need to find more work, to make ends meet.

I was recently offered a job locally to where I live as a girl Friday, but I would need to register as self employed to work with them and the hours will vary from month to month. I really want to take this job on but was worried that it might still not be enough money coming in. So that got me to thinking that if I do register as self employed then I could set up a website and find some more work of my own to top up the hours.
So my questions are:

1 - How does the tax situation work when you are still employed by somebody and also registered/working as self employed?

2 - Would it be better (less complicated) if I also worked for my current employer on a self employed basis? ( the reason I mention this is because a colleague at work left the company and now works for them on a freelance basis, so there could be an option for me to do that).

3 - Should I just give up the self employment idea and just find another part time job?

I've been driving myself nuts wondering what to do for the best so I'm hoping that I can get some feedback on here about the best way forward.

Thank you

 

[@aiteoconsulting]

Hi there

1/ It's a perfectly normal arrangement to be both employed and self-employed at the same time. You would need to fill in a tax return for both your employment income and the additional self-employment income at the end of the tax year. {edit to add that you would need to do other things - eg register as self-employed ... this is not a full 'how to' response}

See note on this page: https://www.gov.uk/employment-status/selfemployed-contractor

2/ Hmmm... bear in mind that you may be getting employment benefits from your employer which are easy to forget about. Eg pension, holidays etc. Any change in status should take into account the value of these benefits.

3/ That's up to you!

Hope this helps. Best wishes

 

[Victoria.]

Many thanks for your reply and for the link. I really like the idea of working for myself to make up my hours to full time and would like to combine my different skills. For instance, I am a trained beauty therapist so if I was to register as self employed could I do the beauty therapy and the girl Friday work under one business or would I need to register them as two different business's ?

 

[Scalloway]

You only need to register once as self employed. If you have different businesses you supply a set of self employed self assessment pages for each business in your tax return.