Lie about student loan and 'living elsewhere'?

ska_lover wrote: »

OP I can see why you would be tempted due to the finances but think about what you are doing - you will be boosting your own finances today in order to drop your son in the poo later on


If he is only able to get the basic element, as you know, the expectation is on you to financially top him up...and thus your household income will come down. Your spare cash will go on his necessities


If you go ahead with this plan OP, the only person to benefit would be YOU. As by cheating it, your son gets a higher loan and the expectation will not be on you to help out as much financially


So you get off scot free, and he ends up in more debt


If it were me and I genuinely had a decent income, I would rather support my lad through Uni than leave him in debt where I could have helped out

Yes, I think you're right. He might well be one of those people who never actually earns enough to fully pay off his student loan (there are many) but hopefully he'll have a high wage and if that's the case then the size of his initial loan will make a difference to his life going forward.

My OH and I spoke last night about how, ultimately, it will be us benefiting if we were to do this and that we'd rather do the right thing and contribute ourselves. Our income isn't massive - it'll mean making adjustments and tightening belts - but that's what you have to do, isn't it.

This whole 'idea' hadn't occurred to us at all when DS's father suggested it out of the blue yesterday. I guess I was just looking for reasons why I should say 'no' (as is my instinct) or to find out if it's a thing that people do all the time (like saying your kid lives at Grandma's to get into a school catchment or something).

Malthusian wrote: »

If people say their kid lives at Grandma's all the time to get them into schools then that's news to me.

To answer the main question, I doubt this sort of thing goes on that often, simply because it's a debt and in theory you have to pay it back. So you don't actually gain anything by lying.

It used to be common to take the maximum student loan and stick it into a bank account, so in theory you could have raised your return, but with interest rates now much higher (and cash rates lower) that's no longer appealing. If you knew your child wasn't ever going to earn enough to pay the debt back then it would be free money, but to plan on that basis would take a startling lack of confidence in their earning ability.

Not necessarily. Martin has done some calculations here (section five) and, although graduates start repaying on everything they earn above £25k, in order to repay the entire debt before it's written off (after 30 years) the graduate would have to have a starting salary of around £40k.

These debts go on for most of their working lives these days. Often they never get entirely paid back. This is why Martin says it should be viewed more as a tax than a debt because it's not about how much the loan is, it's more about how much comes out of your pay packet for most - if not all - of your working life.

Oh, I've never done the school catchment thing, but I know people who have.