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.

People in their 50s and older, never needed loans, they even got paid, via a grant, to go to college and Uni.

No one has earn 't their use of the NHS, its paid for by current tax payers.

But as less and less young people go to Uni and esp healthcare, the NHS and the private health sector will see further staff shortages, longer waiting lists, poorer outcomes

I'm Plan 1, before 2012. We seem to be forgotten about when student loans get discussed.

Since 2023 my student loan has been going up. In 2022/23 alone interest went from 1.5%, to 2.65, to 3.25, to 4.5 to 5%.

In 2024/25 it went up to 6.25%. It's currently sat at 4.3% for 25/26 (statement not out yet).

My payments no longer cover the interest let alone make a difference to the amount I borrowed even with the extra I pay from a second income I get once a year. I was making a difference up until 2023.

In 20 years it is still only £1500 less than what I actually borrowed. I've worked full time and paid since graduating 20 years ago.

It won't be written off until I retire. Imagine being 67 and still paying off your student loan from your 20s.

I think whiners in the title is off in any case. Younger people are facing some worsening conditions and costs.

In my eyes the government and the public are all equally at fault.

The government practically enticed families/people to go to university in their droves. It became the norm to continue education for much much longer than previously. Load up with student debt because you only have to pay it back at a low percentage of your expected higher income.

It was just so easy for younger generation to 'experience university' rather than get off their arses and go to work. It was a badge of honour for families. DS is at university doing a degree in film & tv. Oh, what does he fancy doing when he is finished. Not a clue?

The government gets a way of keeping all this younger generation of f the unemployed lists while not even having to fund them because they are putting themselves further and further into debt with their student loan to fund it. Its an amazing piece of business for the government to hide it behind education.

Come on. At no point did anyone think you were getting funded to go to uni without having to consider the long term effects of paying it back. For those saying they have been paying for x number of years and its more than when you started, this uni education didnt include maths. A bit like a mortgage, if you only pay minimum amounts (The old interest only mortgage), the balance can in fact increase if interest rates fluctuate.

If its increasing, you either got the wrong degree and are not getting paid enough, or you are being stupid and not paying enough of your student loan off each month to make enough of a difference.

All as responsible as each other.

They've already paid for their own bloody loans, why should they pay for yours too? They've paid their taxes, earnt their use of the NHS. The absolute entitlement and lack of personal responsibility from younger generations is gob smacking.

is this satire?

Probably, i tried to answer with a straight face, just in case the pp was serious

I’m not paying my own bloody loan because I didn’t have one - I got a grant and my degree cost me nothing. My use of the NHS is now being subsidised by young healthcare professionals who are having chunks deducted from their salaries to pay interest on the loans they have to take to qualify. That looks like financial support from where I’m sitting.

If you take an interest only mortgage, you pay the interest every month, the capital loan doesn’t increase. If you have a student loan the interest applies from the start of your degree and is added to the loan amount despite you not earning, and the repayment amount when you are earning may not cover the interest especially when there’s a hike in interest rates. It’s not the same thing at all.

At 18 I would have been able to work out that the loan would have interest on it, I wouldn’t have been able to look down the road and predict the impact of interest rates rising significantly 10 years after I took the loan out, nor would I have been able to predict the level of disruption caused by the Trussterfuck etc. or the impact of maternity leave or time out of the work place.

It needs to be reviewed and made fairer.

😂 what an absolute crock of entitled bullshit!

Exactly!

My heart bleeds.....
You took out a loan with terms and conditions applied to it. Interest rates fluctuate. The simple principle was that if you went and got a degree your earning potential should have been commensurately more and would allow you to pay it back.

My point about interest only mortgages is to highlight that kind of funding has existed for decades and decades. Its nothing new. All these people complaining about their loans not reducing, sometimes going up, well they are not even paying enough to cover the interest.

Out of interest when the student loans were given were they sold with cast iron fixed interest rates or were they variable?

Imagine paying £28k off a loan and it's still bigger than when you started.

You have no idea

Not all terms and conditions were made clear e.g compound interest between end of degree and start of next financial year.

If you took out a loan that meant you had to be on £64k to pay any capital off there would be uproar.

Hi, Viv.

Isn’t MNs meant to be educated?!

So people signed forms for loans without asking how much interest they would have to pay off before they started clearing the capital?

Well come on. If you walked in and asked for a mortgage and they said they were willing to lend you £200k. Would you not ask what proportion of your repayment was paying interest and what was paying capital?

As i hinted at above. The government WANTED this because it funded a generation of lazy youngsters who saw going to university as a way of avoiding growing up and going to work. It meant they didnt have to fund unemployment numbers going through the roof.

The design of the student loan system is an absolute scandal. The people who designed it deserve to go to prison.

I agree with you op. Student loans are effectively a tax that you will pay most/all of your working life, so if it’s 60k or 120k it’s largely irrelevant. The reason it never gets paid off is the interest rate is high and the repayment per month is low. Repayment is 9% of earnings over £28,470 so if you earn 60k you repay £235 per month. You can overpay or pay it off early as you would a mortgage, but most people don’t.

But in return you get a qualification that will (should) lift your lifetime earnings significantly above non graduate level earnings. If students go away just for the social life and do a fun degree then that’s very unwise. Most student I know are ambitious and want to get a good job post uni. Masters and conversion courses are common. These cost money but do result in better lifelong earnings. If your friend studied for 10 years I assume they have a good job in a field they love.

How many 17 year olds are walking into the bank for a £200k mortgage?

I'm sure you were known for your financial proclivity at 17 🙄

Regardless of your point, imagine how much this will cost the taxpayer, regardless of the hardship those repaying something (not the loan) are going through. Lazy maybe, but so we're their parents

The government WANTED this because it funded a generation of lazy youngsters who saw going to university as a way of avoiding growing up and going to work

So much contempt for younger people, where does it come from?

you get a qualification that will (should) lift your lifetime earnings significantly above non graduate level earnings.

Then surely there’s no need for loans because graduates will pay significantly more tax than non graduates?

I think you’re missing the point, it’s not about how much people are borrowing it’s the interest they’re being charged! My son only borrowed enough to cover his 9k a year tuition fees and worked his whole way through uni like all his friends did. However on plan 2 it’s the interest rate that is charged and most are seeing their loans increase annually rather than any other loan that decreases! Then there is the 9% they pay from their income over the threshold which impacts on mortgage affordability!

Are you being sarcastic? He caused a lot of the problems/misunderstandings back when he was advocating for everyone to take out full loans and wrongly quoting statistics by using figures for people who didn't pay it fully off, making it sound like a really good deal. What he didn't bother highlighting was the huge number who, yes, didn't pay it all off, but who DID pay off the capital AND huge amounts of interest on top (2 or 3 times the capital) and still didn't manage to pay it off within the time period. I see he's now trying to back track and make excuses for his mis-representation, but the tide is turning against him and I've seen a few newspaper articles criticising him for his misrepresentation, and rightly so.

So do those who advocating for it, such as Martin Lewis!