To not feel very sorry for some student loan whiners

[Viviennemary]

There's been a lot of complaining about student loans and its wrong they seemed to have move the goalposts re paying back. StillI I read about this woman complaining her student loan is £120k and is going up every year. She was a student for 10 years fgs. Just as well the tax payer wasn't funding her. I hope these folk arent just going to be let away with not paying.

Ok

Regardless of how long someone has been in education for, the government is absolutely ripping people on plan 2 loans off. It’s outrageous! I’ve been paying mine off for 6 years and it’s more now than it was at the beginning, how is that right?!

Its not. But people like that Martin Lewis were telling everybody it was the best way of borrowing money. Seems not. Debt is never great.

So you've found one person with exceptional circumstances and now you don't feel empathy for anyone?

The plan two people arent asking for their debts to be wiped. They're asking for the terms they signed up to continue I.e the thresholds increasing each year (and not at a mad interest rate)

Yep mine is the same. Looking online suggests I could still be paying it off until its written off in 30 years time, even though Ive been paying over £100 a month since I graduated as a mature student.

I had the money to pay it off last year, and wish I had done it. The £100 a month could have gone into my pension, or savings instead. I have no objection to paying it back, but this just seems like a total con.

There are students who borrow the maximum they can, because they can and don't want to get a part time job whilst others will juggle multiple jobs, be selective about where they study and get through uni without much debt. So difficult to feel sorry for the extent of some of the loans that some have taken on especially those that went on to a post grad course to avoid getting a job. I do think the whole education systems needs reform though, and working taxes need to be lower so worker have more take home pay to repay loans more quickly.

It’s awful what’s happened people have been lied to. Young people now owe more than they ever anticipated to. YABU

Did you go to university OP? And if so when was that?

I was plan 1 and only graduated with 18k which sounds like nothing now. I’m still paying it off 20 years later. I have a professional job (vet) but was only on 20k when I graduated 20 years ago so was not paying large amounts off it each month, having 3 lots of maternity leave during periods of high interest rates meant that every time I made inroads into it, it would zoom back up again. My husband paid his off years ago, so it feels like a bit of a motherhood penalty to me (along with pensions and everything else).

It’s definitely the high interest and the fact that people on modest salaries doing important jobs (such as nursing, social work, medical research) end up paying much more in the end because it takes longer to pay back than people on high salaries who can pay it back quickly. It’s not as simple as saying get a better paid job, when jobs such as nurses are vitally needed and you can’t qualify as a nurse without a degree.

i have lots of sympathy for the plan 2 students who are lumbered with much bigger loans which only get bigger despite being in work. Either the interest should have been capped/suspended when people aren’t earning enough, or the total interest bill relative to the original loan should have been capped.

Is someone somewhere getting rich off this system or do the overpayers pay for the never payers ?

Surely you could invested the money you were going to pay the loan off with

i am plan 1. I still have £21k to pay, and I’ve been paying it off since 2013. I feel so sorry for those on plan 2 as it’s even worse for them. They’ve been absolutely shafted. They have my absolute sympathies

I’m guessing you didn’t go to university.

I thought you could only get a loan for first undergraduate degree, so assume they have done a masters and PhD

Come on, the whole system is a total mess and grossly unfair.

If you have well-off parents who can just pay you through university, you come out significantly better off.

Working class kid going to university comes out saddled with debt that just grows and grows even when they’re earning enough to be paying some back.

It inhibits those kids getting set up in life. It restricts social mobility, the very thing university should really be about improving.

Its not really fair to find one unsympathetic example and the extrapolate it to the mass of students who are getting royally shafted.

Letting aside the way those loans were advertised / sold, what’s worst is that Plan 2 is effectively a punishment on young students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds, who dared do well in life after their studies and now have a well-paid job.

I am on Plan 2, did a 4-year undergraduate degree and “luckily” was only entitled to, and only took out, tuition fees. 10 years later I have returned to my home country, got a decent (but not high-paying) job, and my minimum monthly payment to SFE currently stands at £230.

Because of the shitty way in which they convert foreign income to the UK tables and repayment brackets, I am paying back almost double a month what I would do, if I had the same job and salary in the UK.

The best part of all this, is that I am approximately £1k over the threshold for the “fixed”, lower interest rate, so my loan is going up by a variable 6-8% interest rate every month. I’ve been paying for a while and the money I owe keeps going up.

I consider myself lucky because again, I finished uni with “only” £36k taken out compared to my British national peers who also took maintenance loans and started off owing double that.

I did the calculator and if I were to pay the minimum amount every month, I wouldn’t finish paying it off before the expiration date. However, I would have given SFE approx. £120k in cash. Almost four times what I initially borrowed.

I am at a point where I’m considering using my house deposit savings plus a local, interest-free loan to pay it all back at once, because it just makes no sense to pay that much back, plus it’s considered a debt in other countries, so good luck to me getting finance approved in the future…

It’s a punishment. A student from a rich family paid £36k upfront to study my degree. Someone who then got a slightly “worse” job is still saddled by the debt but at least the loan is slowly going down. He/she might end up paying around the £80k mark. I would end up paying £120k.

We all studied the same degree. We are all now contributing to society. It is deeply unfair that our fees ended up costing such different amounts.

We could have paid up front but decided not to. Dc are adults and needed to be treated as such.

People who are wealthy enough to have 3 dc don’t get my sympathy much either. Part time working often means next to no payments every month. Unless you are very well paid. This, on plan 2, can amount to years of not paying. Also on plan 2, it’s anticipated less than 50% will pay them off. For many it’s a pretty cheap education and you cannot access many high paying careers without it.

I don’t think the terms should have been altered but it’s not going to alter paying it off. Most won’t and it’s still based on salary, not size of loan or interest.

Teachers and nhs staff should have their loans written off if they work for the nhs or state schools.

dd1 was on plan 2 paying £200/ month with a £30k salary in London. She’s skint.
dd2 is on plan 5, think it’s 40 years.

It will affect their affordability calculations for a mortgage.

It is unfair as pp posted those with well off families could take that burden whereas low income families are penalised for decades.

Absolutely this.

I am also on plan one and have owed around £17k for 20 years, as an NHS professional who has taken several maternity leaves and worked part time to raise children. Pre 2006 plan 1 graduates don’t pay back until age 65, whereas if we had graduated a few years later it would be wiped after 25 years.

I recognise that we had low fees, but I feel annoyed at the idea that it’s not a real loan etc. That only applies if you have the money to pay it off sitting in a high interest savings account.

The long term interest is being paid by the low to mid earners, especially those in essential jobs with little hope for high earning. Those with wealthy parents or high earning corporate jobs will pay it off quickly and end up paying a lot less in total, which doesn’t seem quite right.

Really good point about the motherhood penalty, I hadn’t even thought of that. Each year of maternity leave is less payments and still the same interest, taking you further from paying it off.

So how do you suggest people from low income families get to uni?

The system still ends up penalising people like my daughter who can't achieve her career ambitions without going to uni and end up in a mountain of debt whilst those who have mummies and daddies able to bank roll them will be better off.

I'm really bloody grateful she's had the opportunity to follow her path even if it means student loans, but you can hardly call it a fair and equitable system, on many levels.

The OP Just hates everyone, don't you luv?

Tbh I'm surprised at a lot of the comments about it. 'My loan went up, I owe more than I did originally'.

Well it's not as simple as that.

At the time when they came out, it was made fairly clear it effectively worked as a student tax rather than loan precisely because many people would never pay it off.

But the crucial bit is it's written off after 30 years. So there's always an end point unless you defer and earn the threshold for a number of years.

Now there's loads of people crying that it was all missold. It's people trying it on saying they didn't understand this.

It was made clear and yet here we are. I find it all rather frustrating tbh

That’s how I’d present it to students. That it was a graduate tax
But plan 1 loans have been sold off I read.

And terms have not been honoured with plan 2 re the threshold.

She won’t have gotten loans for 10 years. If she studied part time she still won’t have been funded for more than the equivalent of a 4 year degree overall.

Some dopey twat was wanging on in an interview that over 50s should have to contribute to the student debt of others! I didnt go to uni and therefore I’m not going to shell out because other people are choosing to!

Unfortunately @RedToothBrush they're not all written off after 30years. For those of us on Plan 1, our loan isn't written off until we're 65 so for me, that's 44 years paying it. Plan 2 students get it wiped after 25 years. I'm not sure about subsequent plans.