Tuesday 23 February 2010

Maternity Allowance

So I officially started my maternity leave 12 days ago. I found out all about maternity allowance and finally filled in all the forms and sent them off. It is one of the things about being self-employed that you need to claim maternity pay (or sick pay, etc) through the job centre. It can be done online or by filling out reams of paper and posting them off.

I recently discovered that my father-in-law is baffled by this. He can't see how I should be paid for not working. Even though my husband has explained that it is the same as the maternity pay I received when I was employed in an office with my first child.

It turns out that his bafflement goes a lot deeper than that - he doesn't really 'get' that I work. He thinks that because I don't go to an office every day that what I do doesn't qualify as 'work'. The fact that I pay more tax and National Insurance than he probably does doesn't compute - I'm 'sponging' by claiming maternity allowance. Perhaps if it had been my husband who was self-employed his view would be different - there's no paternity pay for the self-employed.

2 comments:

Reluctant Blogger said...

ha, I remember my grandfather didn't even consider working in an office to be "work". You had to be doing physical stuff to be working. And yeah, you had to be a man! Lord knows what he would have thought of me working from home!

Work at Home Dad said...

Its nice to know that you have maternity allowance.