Yasmin Harper

My husband and I live in France.
We both filled in the necessary form online and subsequently received letters in November (me) and February (him) detailing the years we were eligible to pay for and the amounts.
We called the HMRC NI helpline on 14th March and spoke to someone in turn to advise which years we wanted to pay for, and these were duly noted on our accounts.
We then made separate bank transfers on March 17th for the amounts advised, using the codes as specified in the instructions for overseas payments (our NI number, followed by IC, followed by our surname and initials).
We also sent letters to HMRC on 28th March to re-confirm the amounts and years paid for.
So far nothing has been updated on either of our pension forecasts - they are still saying we need to pay for missing years.
We have paid almost £6000 between us and I am now getting a bit worried about where this money has gone.
I understand that there must have been a much higher than normal volume of payments before the deadline, but how long should we wait?
I have tried using the "Check when you can expect a reply" page, but this doesn't seem to have an option that answers this question.
It seems to be more about correspondence, not making payments. Can someone please advise?

Thanks, but having not previously received a reply from this thread, I already called the helpline who advised me to send a cheque with a covering letter. I luckily managed to find an old UK cheque book, so this is what I have done.

I've lived in France since 2013 and been self-employed here since 2015. I stopped working at my last job in the UK in 2012. I have filled in the CF83 form and received a letter in December with the amounts that I'd need to pay for each year. The first 3 years are Class 3 as I wasn't working during that period. The following 8 years are Class 2 so considerably lower amounts. The amounts are different for each year, although fairly similar for the Class 2 years. I currently have 29 years of contributions from my time working in the UK before moving so need to pay another 6 years to bring it up to 35 years. In the letter there are links to the relevant pages for paying the contributions from abroad, it seems the only option is to pay by bank transfer, quoting your NI number as a reference. My question is, how will HMRC know which years I am paying for? Obviously I would rather pay for 6 of the Class 2 years, but there doesn't seem to be any way to specify. I don't want to make a payment and then find it has all been attributed to just one year of Class 3 instead of 6 years of Class 2! Please can you advise.

I have an online store in France and have been selling to the UK for the last 6 months after registering for VAT. I have put a clear notice on my website that orders must be below £135, or split to create 2 orders if more. A customer has just ignored this and placed a larger order. I was going to cancel it and contact her, bu it just occurred to me that I may be misunderstanding something here. Is the amount of £135 ex-VAT or does it include the VAT? So if a customer were to place an order for £145 including VAT at 20%, plus £10.50 shipping, would that actually be OK, since the amount ex-VAT is under £135?