Student Finance in Wales - can someone clarify?

[Champersandchips]

DS has been accepted at a Welsh Uni and we live in Wales.

Can someone please clarify what he will be entitled to as it sounds like it’s too much.

DH and I have a household income of over 60k, DS will be living at home and travelling into Uni for the 3 days a week that he will have lectures - he’s 10 minutes away on the train.

It appears that he can borrow the 9k to cover tuition fees plus a maintenance loan of around 8.2k plus an extra grant of 1k.

So, he has just over 9k to ‘live on’ a year which seems LOADS.

I watched a seminar by Martin Lewis who positively encouraged borrowing the full amount you can as the threshold to start repaying is around 28k and most students never fully pay it back - free money, so he said.

Now, this seems too good to be true? DH and I had planned to help DS with weekly money but if he borrows the full maintenance loan we won’t have to.

The type of course DS is doing isn’t likely to be a really high paying career from (we’ve had this discussion but there’s no changing his mind).

So, WWYD? Surely it makes sense for him to borrow the lot and save what he doesn’t spend - he could leave Uni with a nice little nest egg.

Any thoughts?

Our Welsh system gives them the "parental" bit as a loan, in case parents can't or don't give financial support. It seems much fairer then English system. Think your figures are correct. My son off this autumn too.

Yes, take what he can as who know what the future brings and he's entitled to it under the current system.

It sounds right, and it’s not too unusual - but I don’t know anyone who actually left uni with the extra money saved, it usually got blown on nights out and laptops etc.