Can anyone explain and say how much roughly uni costs will be and what savings they will need

[Willbeatjanuaryblues]

If they have their own isa with 30 grand in it or more will they qualify for students loans or will they have to use their own savings.

And is there an amount to aim for or a threshold of savings. I have tried a quick Google and I'm not really getting anywhere.

Some of the comments on here are a bit barmy. My children are at uni. The loan pays all of the rent and gives them a weekly allowance. I just pay for food. They have a pt hol job and this gives them a bit in the pot for extras when they go back. I pay for trains home too etc.
It’s pointless using any savings to pay off the loan, just leave it and they will never prob pay off, unless they get amazingly well paid jobs. It will just be written off.
If you use your nest eggs to pay it off then it’s prob money down the drain as it could have possibly been written off anyway. Martin Lewis says the same. One of my children did a foundation year and a masters too. He won’t pay any more back a month than my child who is just doing three years. It’s all based on annual salary.
Uni doesn’t have to cost loads!!

People on MN don't half fib about how much they give their kids.

Just why do people post such vitriolic comments? Why does it bother you how much money people might give their kids?

FevertreeLight - ignore all the snidey digs, I am not sure why others feel they need to make them. If we include ISA contributions, my DS would be getting more than £1000/mth at uni.

He is currently on a placement year, but when at uni, we topped up his minimum loan for halls/house fees, £1400 first year, much less 2nd yr (cheap northern city) then gave him a monthly allowance for living - £300 first year and £350 second year.

He doesn’t get any of that this year, he is earning and paying his way, saving the excess after bills and fun money to fund some travelling after uni.

But we do pay a decent amount into his and DD ISA too, despite them also having an inheritance to drip feed in - purely because our assets exceed IHT limits so we might as well drip feed some to them now, via their ISA, ready for eventual house purchase.

Neither of my kids are lazy or bad with money, quite the opposite really. Both work hard (DD on a gap year in a retail job, had some long shifts over Xmas, DS has also had retail jobs pre and during uni) and are careful with money. However, like FevertreeLight, we still treat them to holidays and at birthday and Xmas, simply because we can - if others on MN don’t believe me, then that’s their problem.

Shock horror, there are some on MN that also pay full uni fees, wonder if you think they are fibbing too RevokeRemainReform? The only reason we are not doing that upfront is because DD may not go.

I don’t know why anyone is worried about coming out with student loans or maintenance loans to pay back. You don’t pay anything unless you earn over 21k and it’s a few quid out your salary every month. If you don’t pay it within 30 years it gets written off. The bailiffs aren’t going to chase you for it. I think it’s madness to throw so much money at kids at uni, unless it’s absolutely necessary to top up fees if they don’t get the full loan

Having just come out of 4 years of this (we funded a BA and then an MA), the BA fees were £9k pa. We also paid about £366 pm rent in years 2 and 3, and an allowance of £500 per month. Last year the fees were just over £6k (alumni discount on fees), Post Grad halls were in excess of £8k and the allowance was £500 per month.

Ds has come out of university with a BA and an MA and no debt whatsoever.

Scary that's what I would ideally like.
I do understand the student debt thing but I'm mid fortifies and having lived hand to mouth for years yes it would affect me now if I earn over the student loan threshold and have to start paying it back!!

Ideally I would like them to come out debt free.

However how many posters would give an 18 year old access to 50 grand or maybe more??!!

But why do you want them to be debt free? Student debt literally does not affect people’s financial comfort or daily lives. You only pay back a proportion of everything you earn ABOVE the threshold, so it’s 9% of everything above 21k. It’s barely noticeable. If you have money to give them it would be far better used towards a house deposit/pension/investment of some sort. I doubt anybody gets to old age with zero pension, no house and the very real prospect of twilight years in poverty and goes hey, at least I don’t have student debt!

It's 9% yes, but if you do a masters too that's another 6% alongside it, alongside, not added on. That means you pay what 35% tax, plus NÍ on anything you earn over £21k. And if you ever get to pay higher rate tax, well then you are paying 55% tax plus NÍ.

Lots of people do a masters nowadays. I think I would try to pay upfront for that.

Are you happy to have another 9% taken off your salary every month snout? Because I sure as hell wouldn't be, and why should young people?
It's an unfair tax on the young.
Could you tell me why people working in public services as nurses, teachers, radiographers etc should have to pay fees for their course, when their training takes place in those public workplaces?
Then, their salaries no longer being competitive due to the extra 9% taken off them have to be pushed up further, also coming out of the public purse. Why not just cut out the middleman banks creaming off government tax money and have no fees for their degree courses? In fact, I don't believe anyone should be charged for a first undergraduate degree, because society benefits from having a well-educated populace.

Shock horror, there are some on MN that also pay full uni fees, wonder if you think they are fibbing too RevokeRemainReform?

Oh calm down, Sophie. There's nothing "vitriolic" about my comment.

Willbeat. We didn't give him access to a large pit of money. We paid the tuition fees to the university and the hall fees for year 1 and transferred money for his allowance. Rinse and repeat, except I paid his rent direct to his l/l for years 2 and 3 (which the l/l liked, as the rent got paid early every time), plus allowance.

For his MA, we paid the fees direct and the Hall costs, and paid his allowance direct to him. An awful lot of this was out of income as well, so no need for a savings pot.

Snout, ds will cop the lot when we die as he is an only child. This way, he gets some of his inheritance up front, which doesn't affect any IHT limits as funding a degree is exempt from IHT; and it also means that it won't be seen as hiding monies or spending unnecessarily if it ever comes to care costs, as it is from income.

Yes, I pay back my student loan out of my salary every month. It’s absolutely fuck all compared to my tax and NI. I, like many others, did not have rich parents who could have funded me through uni, but even if I did, why should they? If they wanted to bestow me a financial gift (which again I would not expect) I would absolutely rather they kept it back to help me out with something that will actually see me through life like a house deposit or a lump sum to put in a pension. Incidentally I do think education should be free and I would like to nationalise the entire housing market but the likelihood of those two things happening are less than zero so, working within the framework currently in place, yes I still think if you have that sort of money it’s madness to pay up front for uni.

For anyone who hasn't even graduated yet, it's 9% over £25k, not 9% on the whole amount.

If you earn £25k or less, you pay back, precisely zero. If you earn £30k, you will pay back £450 per year, or less than £40 pm. If you earn £40k, you'll pay back about £100 pm and are still not likely to pay back all your student loans in the 30 years before they are written off.

Most nurses, teachers, radiographers etc will earn within this range for their entire career, and yes it is probably unfair that public sector professionals on not particularly great wages have to effectively pay for their own training, but the amount they pay back isn't really that significant out of a monthly take home pay of around £2k pm.

@BarbaraofSevillle's summary above is correct for now and the terms at the moment do make it sensible to take the loan and only consider self-funding if it becomes clear that they are on a trajectory to a very high-paying career.

The problem is that there is already precedent for the government unilaterally and retrospectively altering the terms whenever it suits. the thresholds and percentages can be changed on the whim of the government of the day and who knows what gang of incompetent buffoons will be calling the shots in 30 years time?

Nevertheless some saving is also necessary because as PP say the loan is unlikely to be sufficient. I am tying my savings targets to the scholarship amounts offered by Russell-Group and high-end universities - they typically offer scholarships of £3k per year for students with excellent a-level results from very low income circumstances. obviously the actual sums needed will be more in a decade due to inflation, but I am taking this as a general indicator of the difference between the loan amounts and the actual costs.

As 18yearolds don't always make good decisions, only half will go into DC-named accounts and half will be in my name and will not be made available if the cash in their name is blown on a car/holiday/general caroosing.

I agree with the others, consider it as a graduate tax, and not deb. see Barbara’s explanation of costs above.

Most people I know pay between £400 per month towards living and rent expenses.

When I was at uni I had a term time job and a job when I went home in the holidays. We were dirt poor and my parents couldn't support me in any way.

This meant I could survive at uni, without these jobs I couldn't have gone.

Do students these days not get part time jobs any more?

Barbra put like that it does seem negligible.

I'm hoping mine get written off soon!

Scary, I'd rather we had control of it yes or gp did.
.I think its lovely to have some cash at 18, buy a decent safe car, driving lessons, some money for socialising, extra stuff at school or college, money to maybe do apprenticeship somewhere or work experience...

But not access to money that's serious money.

I find it sad snout that you don't seem to recognise that your education is "something that will see [you] through life".

It is only down to my education that I am in the position to pay for my children to attend university and graduate debt free (that's the current plan, things may change, obviously, there's at least 8 years before either could go). My parents refused to make the parental contribution (though they were far from the "rich" you imagine). I took loans and overdraft, and worked every weekend and holiday. And it was shit, my work definitely suffered, and I do not want my children to be pushed down the same route. If either end up at Oxford or Cambridge (certainly on the cards for one) then the term/academic structure there isn't suitable for working whilst studying in any case.
My children already know how to work hard, and have no issue with grafting when they need to. Not working at university won't change that because their work ethic was instilled at a young age.

And fevertree when you listed the hall/rent figure, I assumed that was part of your payments, not coming out of the £1k a month -sorry, it was a little late last night

Snout Ds already has a house deposit stashed as an inheritance, and there is little point paying a lump sum into a pension as you don't know if you'll be alive to reap the benefit (my Dad died at 60, so never got his state pension).

Both of us benefited from free university education, and we wanted the same for ds. It's up to us how we spend our income, and we chose to spend it on him, as an education will see him set for life hopefully.

Meant to add I noted that student debt has now been moved onto the government's books www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/dec/17/student-loan-hole-public-finances-ons-accounts wheer they hadn't been before, so what else will change?

Personally my degree was an absolute waste of time and I know a LOT of people who whom it isn’t worth the paper it’s written on - degrees are so ubiquitous now that they really won’t make you stand out in the job market. I actually quit mine after the first year (still paying back some of the loan) and I still work in the industry that the degree was in. Nobody has ever asked me about it. I honestly don’t think anyone should bother to go unless they’re doing something very specific and traditionally academic like medicine, law, teaching etc.

For me that just represents the entire problem with the inheritance system. It divides people the haves and have-nots and keeps substantial wealth within families. Some people, by way of inheritance, already have a house deposit waiting for them, so it actually doesn’t matter whether they come out of uni debt free or find decent employment because whatever they do they’ll be fine. So it’s really not about merit and earning things, it’s literally just about having money. I personally would like to see university being made free (and fat cat chancellors paid far less) but inheritance abolished. That’s the only way anyone would be on anything approaching an even keel.

FWIW I entirely agree with Martin Lewis' stance on students loans. It's a tax, and people really shouldn't think its a debt. As pp have said, many people don't have to pay it all back and its a few extra quid every month on a salary over £21k. Far better to use the money for more important things such as a house deposit later.

So working hard & putting away some money to make your children's lives a little easier shouldn't be allowed? Maybe we could all doss around and not bother to do anything? I do get what you are saying but it just doesn't make sense.

It's a tax, and people really shouldn't think its a debt.

It's a regressive tax where those who can afford to pay them off upfront pay less (because of no interest) than those on lower incomes who take longer to pay them off. An actual tax would actually be fairer IMO.

Furry I think there should be hefty taxes on financial gifts over a certain amount and assets after death go back to the local authority or something along those lines. I’m more interested in an equal society across the board than a few rich people giving money to their kids. I’d happily lose out myself if it gave people less fortunate a better chance