To be a bit worried about paying for DC university costs!

[rollonthesummer]

How do people manage it-how does it all work?!

In my day-I had siblings at university the same time as me-and we qualified for one grant between us! That paid for the accommodation and my parents gave me £125 a month to live on-I never needed a loan.

What happens now? Do they/you apply for one set of money (£9000 a year?) for the tuition fees and a separate loan for living? Is the amount you can borrow based on what your parents earn? If so-what is the current cut off??

Those with children at university now-what are you paying out on a monthly basis???

Swedish people are paying those sorts of amounts!
My DC in Year 1 of a 6 year course. The maintenance grant that he would have been entitled to of £8k in previous years has changed this year to a loan. So £9k fees loan and £10k maintenance loan. The latter just covers his halls. So from my low income I pay mobile phone, groceries, food, toiletries and travel.
Don't underestimate the cost!

A big problem with the maintenance loan is that you have to decide in advance how much you want (of what you are entitled to ) and can't vary it during the year. So you could end up not using all the loan you took out or spend a bit wildly. If you take too little you can come a cropper if you need more later.

There no grants in England from Student Finance anymore but individual Universities do give money to some students. At the local Uni students whose parents are on low incomes can get up to a £3k "scholarship" in the first year and £1k the next 2 years.There is a sliding scale and even students whose parents earn about 42K get something. There are also £2K bursaries for students whose A level grades outstripped those asked for in their original offer. Amounts and types of scholarships/bursuries on offer vary between Unis depending on the funds they can allocate. My niece can only get a maximum of £750 scholarship a year at her uni - it can be worth shopping around a bit.

I shudder to think of how much debt my kids will be in - when a few miles across the border in Scotland it is free and I think there are still grants! and Wales and NI have easier terms too - seems unfair when we all pay the same taxes.

My post was to Swedish not about Swedish people!

Marking my place to swot up on this. I worries me sick at how I'm going I manage. I'm considering a Mon - Friday lodger when mine are at uni in a decade.

We gave DD £350 a month to cover food, toiletries, clothes and entertainment. She then paid her rent out of her loan. I know many of her friends parents did it the other way round though. On top of this we would pay for academic books, any other costs associated with the course - not many thankfully, prescription charges, train fares home to visit, a pair of new shoes or boots every autumn and new winter coat every two years. She seemed to manage fine on this (at uni in the South East but not London) and could concentrate on her studies without having to get a job.

It has been expensive for us but I think we did the right thing. The thing is not to worry too much you can only sensibly give what you can afford plus you have to think of your other DCs too if you have them, and being fair.

I have two in uni. They get about £6000 in loan and I give them £200 a month during term time, so I pretty much make it up to the max loan of £8200. They have to buy everything out of that though, phone, clothes, travel.
There is a noticeable saving on bills when they are away.

Have had similar nightmares regarding my DD starting uni next year. She will only get minimum maintenance loan. Really don't know where we are going to find the extra 5k she will need to cover room and living costs.

The government give very little warning when they are about to change the fees and loans which makes it hard to plan. They took away the NHS bursary and free tuition which really stymied the career plans of mature students on Access courses. The rise in fees from £3300 to £9, 000 a year and the recinding of maintenance grants was also a shock for those planning and saving to help in line with what had been happening for a few years. The government would like to let Unis charge whatever they like for fees but have more uni based scholarships (bit like USA) so poor kids could still access Oxbridge etc if they decided to charge say £40k a year.

DD is at uni in London and as I am a low earner she got the full £11k maintenance loan .as well as fees.

However as her uncatered halls are £235 per week, yes, per week, her maintenance loan doesn't even cover her rent. And as already established, I am on a very low income which is why she gets the full loan.

This means she has to work to cover a lot of her expenses. Obviously I pay out for what I can, but I can't give her what I haven't got and I already work about 70 hours a week. Her father is giving her £150 per month which just about covers food, but it can be really tough for students when the parents simply don't have the money.

She is moving out to a shared house next year, but it will still be around £180 per week and her travel costs will increase as she won't be living on campus..............

DD is in her first year. She gets £9k loan for fees and her maintenance loan is £3821. Her self catered halls are just under £6k per year so we make up that difference of around £2k and give her a monthly allowance of £220.

Fortunately we paid our mortgage off several years ago so we can afford this. Not everyone in the higher income bracket automatically has enough disposable income to support children through uni though.

She will, of course, have this huge debt when she graduates and no matter how many times people say "it doesn't affect future credit or mortgage applications" it bloody does! One of our newly qualified teachers had her lender refuse a mortgage unless she decreases her student debt to no more than £20k. Whenever I see forms for any form of credit you have to declare any student loans.

Minimum maintenance loan is £3700, I think. DD gets that to live on (she doesn't spend it all and is able to save up for a holiday). We pay accommodation (£6250 first year, about £100 per week this year), phone, buy a laptop & pay car costs (not petrol). She doesn't use the car very much except to come home & go to the supermarket. She bought the car out of earnings.

Wow. What an eye opener. My eldest is only 8 but I wonder how much everything will have increased by then. If annual tuition fees are £9000 now god knows what they will be in 10 years time! It's scary really.

On the school fees point.

I remember many moons ago when I started uni, first night guy walked into the bar and announced his mum had just given him a cheque for £20k, as she no longer needed to pay school fees.

Made me feel like a completely different world then and still does now!

The other potential cost - don't know if anyone else has mentioned it - is that quite often you effectively 'have' to guarantee their rent (and other costs eg if they trash the flat, which obviously you hope they won't!) when they move into private accommodation in the second year. And quite often the guarantee is drafted so that you guarantee all the tenants' obligations.

Yes you can try to get it rewritten but if there are accommodation shortages that may not be possible - and restricts choice of accommodation as well.

Would be interesting to know how often the guarantees are called on, but having to sign the guarantee is a 'hidden cost' that can also come as a shock.

I have paid the fees for the older 3 and will for the twins later this year and their rent and a sum weekly for food etc. This is on the basis they do not take on any debt at all - no student loans or over drafts. They also have all the money saved over 18 years from presents from relatives at Christmas and birthdays since they were babies as a kind of university fund - not vast - I think the twins have £10k each.

I will pay the twins £150 a week per twin from July (so they have a bit of a stock of money ready by the time they start in September).

It will cost £9250 fees, about £7k rent, £7800 allowance per twin per year so about £150k for the two over 3 years. The £25k per twin per year is more than their school fees but I think I can manage as they won't be living at home some of the year when at university so I should save a bit there.

However loads of people don't get anything from parents at all and the loan if you take it will cover all the fees and some of the rent (or indeed plenty of children live at home so no rent to pay by the way) and my older children sometimes had jobs too particularly over the summer which helps as well.

Not everyone will agree with parents helping of course. I can also see the contrary view that the child who knows they will have to pay back loans is less likely to pick a useless degree (although to be fair you don't pay a single penny back if you never earn much.......)

We pay rent, phone, gym, uni books and support him when he's at home. Works out aboutique £500 a month. He works in the summer holidays and a bit in the othersame.

It is an expensive business attending university. We are very lucky as my DH is a high earner so we can easily afford the fees etc but I really feel for those who are on a low income and struggle to afford it. My DD started this year and it was £9000 for the fees and around £7000 for her catered halls. I thinks DH gives her £250 per month for her other expenses. She has got a shared flat for next year and the rent alone will be £400 per month.

DD has said that most people she has made friends with in her halls and on her course went to private school (as did she i have to say) and don’t struggle too much financially but to me that just says that going to university is going back to the old days of only for those that can afford it. That is absolutely not what it should be. When i went in the 80’s with a full grant there were many people like me who came from an ordinary working class background and it was great that everyone could get an education no matter how rich or poor they were.

One of our newly qualified teachers had her lender refuse a mortgage unless she decreases her student debt to no more than £20k

That's a bit pointless.
Student loans under the current rules are repaid at 9% of your earnings above £21000. The amount of the debt does not have any effect on the monthly payment. If your student loan is £10000 or £50000 (as many will be) the monthly pay deductions are the same, it is the length of time to repay that differs.
I could understood that Mortgage lenders will treat the loan repayments as reducing the amount of income available to repay a mortgage but reducing the student loan below £20000 will have no effect on the monthly amount of repayments.

I think it bonkers that an18+ year old is still linked to parents re earnings etc. It is absolutely not on.

We're in Scotland so no tuition fees. We have two at Uni. We give them £50 per week each. One set of grandparents gives them £50 per month each and the other set gives them £20 per month each.

They both have part time jobs.

Yes, it's worrying the amount of debt our children take on (for those of us not in a position to pay everything for them), but remember back in the 80s, a lot of us were paying income tax at 30% and I had a mortgage at 15% in the late 80s. Look upon student debt as a graduate tax.

If you've children yet to go to uni, take note of the amount of money you as a parent need to have available to them.

Do you know there's a student loan calculator online which will calculate approximately how much your dc are entitled to? You input your household income etc, and some other details. That's a good figure to work from as I've found it quite accurate.

Someone up thread mentioned having to act as guarantor for the rent on shared houses. My DD's uni have Halls for 1st year only then you have to find your own digs. It is the SE and rent is about £125+ for a room in a fairly grotty house.
My DD went into a shared house with some Hall mates. I had to act as guarantor for the whole house i.e. everyone's rent for the entire contract as did the other guarantor's. It was 6 beds - I had never met 4 of them and yet had to guarantee their rent. The forms were very detailed they wanted bank statements, payslips - all sorts - very intrusive. One girl's mum was on JSA and they said she had to pay the entire year's rent upfront (around £6k) as her mum could not be guarantor - luckily her Gran could come up with it but she really thought she would be homeless. The agent also tried to say that since I was guarantor for the whole house that my income should be 3 times the combined rent for the year - this would have been about £106k - he had to drop that one! Then there are extra expenses for the agent's "admin fees", credit checks and the landlord trying to keep your deposit. The Deposit protection scheme helps but if you get in dispute with the landlord the money is frozen so you end up compromising and letting him keep a chunk as you need it back.

There is also the crazy system where you start looking for a house at the beginning of the second term and have to pay fees and a holding deposit up front even though you won't be moving in until the summer.

It is so ridiculous!

Yes that was me who posted about guarantees Loinnir - though I had never heard of having to have an income of £106k! There was another thread about it recently - and the problems for dc if dparents aren't considered good for the guarantee.
It is a real problem for some people I would have thought - but has never become a campaigning issue. I suppose because (like student finance) it's relatively short lived.

Shared houses aren't new though - I wonder if lls have always required guarantees from dparents?

Ciutadella - I think they have. My friend who lived in shared house back in the mid 80's had her dad as guarantor. People moved in and out of houses during term time more frequently and a couple moved in when an original tenant moved out - they never paid their rent and her dad ended up having to pay it as he was a lawyer and worried about having a CCJ or debt against him. The other parents refused to cough up.

Students are a very low risk for nonpayment for LL's because their parents are on the hook for the rent and they tend not to complain much about grotty conditions/repairs compared to other tenants as they will only be there for a year. they are a goldmine for LL's really.

There are 2 unis in my town and the rents in the town and on nearby ex council estates are now sky high. There are very few houses available for families to rent as the LL can charge a lot more for sharing students and have more rooms by using the reception rooms as bedrooms. The council is now finally cutting back on granting HMO applications as so few families can rent.