Student Loan never seems to go down

[BeigeBuffet]

Is this right and is this your experience of the Student loan company..........
My DH has a student loan beginning in 1999. He's been paying it off through his employer, but it never seems to go down.

We've got a financial advisor coming in to my work next week to give out free advice, so seizing the opportunity I've tried to get organised and write down everything we have/owe/need to save for. However his student loan seems to stay stubbornly around the £7k mark, even though a few years ago, it was at the £7k mark and he made an £800 payment.

DH has phoned the student loan company who have said that they will write to him next April with his balance, but that the money he's been paying out of his monthly salary won't count yet as it's not factored in. It concerns me that he is now paying interest on a higher amount than what he owes.

How can we find out exactly how much student loan he owes at this exact moment?

That doesnt sound right if it was £7k and now still is roughly £7k

have you googled some of these questions?

OK, assuming he has a new style income contingent loan NOT an older mortgage style loan... I have discovered through much pain and many many phone calls that the system works like this:

You pay monthly through salary, it is collected by HMRC. The money is then transfered from HMRC to SLC company once a year, theoretically in April but often months and months late. So by the time they have generated a statement for the year ending the previous April it is already out of date because it takes so long to come through you have already made more payments through salary. Hence lots of people significantly overpaying.

Basically it is up to you to know how much you owe, no-one else has a clue.

I think there may be some kind of calculator now on their website if you log in.

I don't bother any more. Too stressful, I will never pay it off, and no of course I can't remember the password I set 13 years ago!

I have a newer style loan and so don't know if this is will be the same for his but thought I'd share my experience.

You can log into online account and find out the balance as at previous April, you can then factor in what you know you've paid to bring you to December. When I did this I realised it wasn't right phoned them and they confirmed figures that were inaccurate and had to write in with pay slips etc so do check statements against payslips.

Oh and when I rang to say there was a problem they sent me a statement with every payment on this was important for checking against, I'd ring back and ask them to send one, no reason why you have to wait for April if you don't have a current statement (although will only go up till April).

May not be relevant for your DH but what seemed to send mine funny was a change of name that coincided with a new job, you'd think no one ever did either of those things!

Good luck getting it sorted, is nice to see it coming down.

Thanks for the advice, it's a whole new world for me so I've been trying to help DH but I've got a lot of info to catch up on so I really appreciate your advice.

I've told DH to get on the phone, reset his passwords and get an itinerised statement so we can cross check against his paycheques.

Thanks

I guess it will go up each year if the interest amt is greater than your repayment.
My DH has a loan that has gone up every year as he does not earn enough to pay it back

The interest rate is very low (1.5 for loans after 1999) so it would be odd that the loan has not decreased in the last year.
Of course payements all depend on how much he earns. Your husband will pay off 9% of his salary on anything he earns above 16k and this payement is taken directly from his monthly salary.
As others have said he can get his password and login from the SLC (really easy to do) and check the balance.
Good luck with getting it sorted. It's a long process but mine is nearly paid off I'll be so relieved when it's done!