Whenever I have tried to answer the question of how much tax do I pay I have always come a bit unstuck, the reason is that I simply don't know. I can check my wage slips and tell you how much Income Tax I pay and How much National Insurance I pay, I could tell you from my reminders how much Council Tax and Vehicle Excise Duty I pay and I could even make a stab on the amount of Stamp Duty I pay but I could not tell you how much it costs me just to live in the UK as I can come no where near understanding how much Fuel Duty, Green Taxes and VAT I pay in the course of an average year. Well until now anyway, as that is exactly what I am aiming to do, Over the course of 2014 I am going to try and keep an exact track of how much I spend and how much of it will end up with the Government.
Firstly to give a bit of background so that you will hopefully understand the experiment.
For reasons of maintaining a slight amount of privacy I am not intending to reveal actual amounts of my wages etc... although obviously as I will be publishing the amount of income tax I pay you will be able to work it out (if you've really got nothing better to do with your time.) but hopefully it will be enough to say that I am a higher rate tax payer, but only just I am also going to be trying to be careful about what I spend money on this year which will hopefully make it easier to keep up with recording my VAT records (But from history it is highly unlikely I will manage to watch my spending for too long!) Also most of my monthly payments come out on the 1st of the month so there will most likely be a big spike in VAT at this time. Also there are no plans for doing anything abnormal this year (Like buying a house) so no big Stamp Duty bills or anything, also I am only going to include direct payments to the government (So for example with the lottery it will just be the amount paid in Tax rather than the amounts paid to quasi-governmental bodies like the lotteries commission) But I will include the TV License fee as although the BBC is technically independant the License fee is taken without my agreement and I have no control over where it goes, which is a Tax in my book.
Hopefully at the end of the year I will know how much it has cost me to live in the UK and what percentage of my money ends up with the government.
I would really appreciate comments if you have them as whilst I doubt this will show anything mind blowing it would be great if someone found this interesting.
Anyway now onto the New Year and the start of the experiment.
