It's tax season! :D
Mar. 10th, 2020 08:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brin_bellway[cw: poverty]
In the eyes of the Canadian government, I am a fast-food worker who is taking university courses, *not* a university student who is working in fast food. I am (just barely) old enough, make (just barely) enough money, and take few enough courses to meet the thresholds for this.
This is a good thing in two ways:
One, I'm eligible for the full amount of the low-income working benefit, which for someone in my situation is very large. My tax rebate this year was the size of two months' wages! The total amount of money I have roughly doubled upon receiving it!
(in more absolute terms, it was about sixteen hundred bucks)
Two, as a career fast-food worker, my accountant training qualifies as "training to switch careers", and next year they're going to start offering a $250 refundable tax credit for that. (Also applicable to training to *advance* your career, which I might well end up doing later: a certificate is plenty for entry-level accounting jobs here, and I *might* be able to get by on just that (+ work experience) indefinitely, but after a few years a bachelor's starts being handy. We'll see what my energy levels are like once I've gotten into the swing of full-time work.)
In the eyes of the Canadian government, I am a fast-food worker who is taking university courses, *not* a university student who is working in fast food. I am (just barely) old enough, make (just barely) enough money, and take few enough courses to meet the thresholds for this.
This is a good thing in two ways:
One, I'm eligible for the full amount of the low-income working benefit, which for someone in my situation is very large. My tax rebate this year was the size of two months' wages! The total amount of money I have roughly doubled upon receiving it!
(in more absolute terms, it was about sixteen hundred bucks)
Two, as a career fast-food worker, my accountant training qualifies as "training to switch careers", and next year they're going to start offering a $250 refundable tax credit for that. (Also applicable to training to *advance* your career, which I might well end up doing later: a certificate is plenty for entry-level accounting jobs here, and I *might* be able to get by on just that (+ work experience) indefinitely, but after a few years a bachelor's starts being handy. We'll see what my energy levels are like once I've gotten into the swing of full-time work.)
