Is anyone else going to have a student loan until age 65 (Plan 1 pre 2006)?

[studentloanuntil65]

I have a Plan 1 student loan and had no idea that I’d have the debt till 65 when I took out the loan in 1998, at age 18.

I’ve never been a high earner and took time out of employment to look after our children due to the high cost of childcare and no family support.

The interest has snowballed, even while I was working, and I’m never going to clear it before I’m 65.

It feels very unfair when I’m seeing that people on the other loans have theirs wiped out after 25 or 30 years. I’m 46 and have already had this loan hanging over me for over 25 years.

I didn’t realise until seeing a BBC article this morning that other people on plan 1 (2006 onwards loans) get theirs wiped after 25 years! Mine would already have been wiped. And if I’d been a year older I’d have had a full grant as my parents were low earners.

No, I’m not having to pay it back, but it’s still a weight on my shoulders knowing that I owe it. When I became a SAHM they wrote to me and told me that my husband had to write a letter to them confirming that he was supporting me, with evidence via bank statements, which seemed a bit ridiculous as I’m supposed to pay the loan back via PAYE when I earn enough.

Is anyone else in the same boat with Plan 1?

I’m in the same boat @studentloanuntil65

i took out the maximum loan for 3 years plus another year to complete a pgce. Graduated in 2011. At the highest, I owed £22k and it kept increasing with interest. The interest was 7% at one point!

I have been a full time teacher since graduating 15 years ago so have always had money taken to pay the loan and I still owe £9k now!

Hopefully I will clear it in the next 5 years.

I graduated 2003 with about £13k, it will be paid off next year. I could pay it off now but my saving account interest is almost double the loan interest so it makes no sense. DP is the one who stresses out over my loan even though there is no need (he didn't go to uni).

I had 8 years where I didn't pay due to SAHM and then working v part time so under the threshold.

I'm just about a high rate tax payer so the loan has gone down rapidly in the past 3 years as I earn enough now to actually pay off the capital. I probably will have cleared mine just under 25 years but if I had continued working p/t then would probably had another decade of that deduction.

Also @studentloanuntil65I would check if you can access online. I couldn’t access mine originally as it was a plan 1 loan but now I have an account and can see my details on there.

You definitely can access it online, thats where I go to request the refund

Took out my loan in 1999 for 3 years. 3.3k p/a.

I didnt earn enough to pay it back until I'd been working for 5 years. Then I had children, maternity leaves, and went part time. I paid a tiny amount back for years. Then I took 5 years out of my career to care for my mum. After she died I returned to work very part time. I paid tiny repayments.

In the last 18 months I have taken a much better paid, full time role. All of a sudden it is due to be paid off in January.

They write to you when you get close to paying it off to suggest you switch from PAYE to direct debit payments. I thought these were scam emails for ages. I eventually logged into my account and saw the letters so contacted them.

I am surprised I have got to the point where it will be paid off before I hit 65...like a lot of posters I never gave it much thought and the £80/100/150/200 student loan deduction a month just appeared on my payslip and I accepted that I would just never see that bit of my salary.

So a happy surprise in my case. I was resigned to the 'tax' for my entire working life.

Thanks, I’ll check, though I haven’t had any of their request letters for a few years and I’m worried I’ll set them off again! Plus the last statement I had was quite scary looking at the interest added.

I have 2 loans. One plan 1 from 2005 which I’ll have til I’m 65. Another plan 2 from 2010 (PGCE) which will clear after 25 years. I did earn enough to pay off a bit each month between my degrees and again from 2012-2024 but last time I looked I still owed £12k, will be more now due to maternity leave and going self employed so not earning much at the moment.

One thing I’ve never understood was which loan I was paying off. It would be beneficial for me to pay off the plan 1 first, as the plan 2 will be wiped sooner. But I have no idea how they assign the payments or which debt is being cleared. When I log in it just shows my total debt, not my debt for each loan.

I’ve just had a quick look through all the letters I’ve had. It looks like my loan was a total of between £10-11k and the last statement I had in 2019 said it was at £14,165 due to interest.

There’s also the hassle of when you do go over the threshold one month (due to overtime, a bonus or an error in payment the month before) they take a student loan payment because they presume that’ll be what you’ll get paid every month even though you won’t have met the yearly threshold. You then have to go through the process of claiming it back.

I did this one year and they claimed that they hadn’t even had the money from my employer, despite it showing on my payslip that it had been taken! It took months to sort out - something had gone wrong between my employer/ HMRC and the SLC.

Op I don't know what plan I was on but I'm a teeny bit older than you and mine was written off ? I just have been around then are you sure yours won't get written off ?
Yes it was a pyscological burden and with many jobs going so fast to ai and Students coming out with such vast debt I don't know how they will cope.

If it makes you feel any better about those on the other loan types OP then what you owe in total now is roughly what someone would owe for 1 year of uni if they took the max tuition and minimum maintenance loan this year.

They may get it written off a couple of years sooner but they’ll likely repay a lot more.

Better to just ignore your student loan completely as it is what it is, unless you have a lump sum to pay it off (and it may not even be worth doing so depending how much you pay monthly) then there’s not really anything you can do about it. Treat the deduction from your pay as the same as tax/NI.

Yes, mine will be written off at the end according to the calculator

How have you still got it. I’m the same age as you and it wasn’t possible to borrow that much then.

You sound like you had the maximum & you need to be earning 50k ish to start making a dent in it really. So i wouldn’t worry to much about it now.

So are you actually paying off any at the moment - roughly how much has been coming out of your pay packet monthly in the past 10 years or so? If you're paying off a very small amount I'm not sure you can be aggrieved you've not paid it off.

Edit for typos

@number1of7I see lots of people who still have it (due to job), it’s really not that unusual.

A teeny bit older and I wouldn’t have needed a student loan - 1998 was the first year of this system.

if you earn 35k ish you will pay approx 1k a year but that won’t reduce the debt just pay the interest (from memory).

I was lucky.

I took out two loans for. £1500 and had a student overdraft and a graduate loan of £5000. Between 1996 + 1999.

Lucky because I bought a very cheap flat in London in 2001 aged 23 with a 100% mortgage from Northern Rock. I sold the flat 18 months later and made a £47k profit and paid all my loans off and put a deposit on a house with now DH.

I regretted taking them out in the first place. Whilst the graduate loan was for a car, I drank and holidayed my way through the other cash. My parents were very very low earners too, but my grant paid my accommodation and I worked every holiday for living money.

It’s not the amount, it’s having it hanging over me for the reasons I’ve mentioned above. Having to deal with them until I’m 65.

It really was, I have the documents. My parents didn’t earn enough to pay tuition fees or support me, so I was entitled to borrow more.

So you only had a loan of £9k? I don’t think you can really compare that to the later student loans that get wiped earlier, and you’re not even making repayments. I came out with over £30k, been paying it back for over 15 years now and still have more left than you started with. I’m in the 40% tax band so my repayments are quite high. Your in a good situation with your loan compared to lots of us.

Well I had a loan and it was written off after 25./ 30 years

It’s when you earn 60k plus that the monthly payments do really impact what you take home.

Yes. Didn't earn enough to pay back for quite a while and do now. Is it 65 for writing it off as I thought it would be 67 when I retire and I worked out it should be about cleared by then. The most annoying part it that when we get out pitiful pay rise, they seem to take most of the back pay as the calculate my new salary incorrectly.

No, I’m a SAHM. My husband had to write a letter to them upon their request, confirming he was providing for me and proving this via a bank statement once their systems had noticed I wasn’t working!

I have never earned enough to pay any back prior to becoming a SAHM, other than the odd months when I worked overtime or had a bonus and the system presumed that would be a monthly thing so took it out despite me not meeting the annual threshold.