Mis-sold my student loan!

tinkerbell84

theexo51 wrote: »

To now cover the cost of my interest i will need a £5k pay rise, or about 30% increase in salary. Surely the SLC should at least raise the minimum threshold to go with DOUBLING my payments

So you did a degree, got into debt, and only earn £16.5k a year? :eek:

anna42hmr

JanCee wrote: »

There is a very good article on the site that Martin has done. It is in the Loans section, under Student Loans - Should You Pay them off? It may put your mind at rest about interest rates etc.

i agree, the article was very good for me, and helped me decide what to do with the 1 year worth of slc loan i had got (i went to uni for a year but left after the first year due to personal reasons) i weighed up paying it off out of savings or keeping the saves and when i balenced it out keeping the savings and paying it off gradually out of the pay cheque was more beneficial for my personal savings, not sure ref yours, as i got mine 8 years ago

mrcow

Why don't you just increase your repayments and actively pay it off?

funky1471

tinkerbell84 wrote: »

So you did a degree, got into debt, and only earn £16.5k a year? :eek:

That's quite a funny response . A little piece of paper does NOT mean a large salary instantly. Especially depending on the type of degree.

If the OP has say a computer science degree they could make probably £18-24k a year as a junior programmer if living in the North of the country.

If they have a less practical degree then they can struggle to find something much over £15k, this is not an uncommon thing to happen.

I don't think the OP has been mis-sold the loan, and as said you can pay off more if you want to, I admit it would be a bit annoying if that happened to me, but I don't start paying off mine until next April, but by then I should definitely be earning a decent crust

jamtart6

tinkerbell84 wrote: »

So you did a degree, got into debt, and only earn £16.5k a year? :eek:

Most people I graduated with started on less than £15k. Which means you dont pay your loan back until you earn over 15k, but the interest on the loan still goes up during this time which I thnk is quite bad.

Idiophreak

theexo51 wrote: »

my belief that i was missold lies with the fact that as a young person just out of college, i was sold a loan without it being made clear that there was a danger of me never being able to pay it off.

Whenever you take a loan out, there's a danger you'll never be able to pay it off - if you don't make the payments....

It's important to remember that the payments the SLC takes are *minimum* payments only...on some credit cards, if you only make the minimum payment, you'll never clear it....

I wouldn't try and wash my hands of responsibility here...If I want the loan paid off, I have to pay it off...

You were (presumably) 18 at the time you took the loan out, so an adult...I'm sorry, I just don't see the problem here...

Titch89

jamtart6 wrote: »

Most people I graduated with started on less than £15k. Which means you dont pay your loan back until you earn over 15k, but the interest on the loan still goes up during this time which I thnk is quite bad.

It's inflation; meaning you're paying back what you took out.

tinkerbell84

funky1471 wrote: »

That's quite a funny response . A little piece of paper does NOT mean a large salary instantly. Especially depending on the type of degree.

If the OP has say a computer science degree they could make probably £18-24k a year as a junior programmer if living in the North of the country.

If they have a less practical degree then they can struggle to find something much over £15k, this is not an uncommon thing to happen.

I don't think the OP has been mis-sold the loan, and as said you can pay off more if you want to, I admit it would be a bit annoying if that happened to me, but I don't start paying off mine until next April, but by then I should definitely be earning a decent crust

Just shows how little value there is in degrees these days.

My OH has an IT degree from a northern uni. He's never earned less than 30k, and never less than 50k in London.

I don't have a degree, but I was earning more than 25k by the time I was 20, and now earn significantly more than that (I'm 27). My sister doesn't have a degree either, and earns similar to me.

I work in recruitment, and the number of unemployable graduates is amazing. The education system in this country is a joke.

Idiophreak

tinkerbell84 wrote: »

I work in recruitment, and the number of unemployable graduates is amazing. The education system in this country is a joke.

What, you mean that 50% of kids going to uni *isn't* a good thing!!?

funky1471

Lol I agree that there are a lot of unemployable graduates, but that is because it's possible to pass a degree without actually learning the stuff. You can caost through it and still get a good mark.

I'm a good computer programmer for somebody my age and experience, but there are others who have done the same course as me (some I have been with since fnishing GCSE's) and they would not know where to start, even though they have passed the same modules on programming, i'm not sure if you can see what i'm getting at here?

I know this isn't the only reason people can't find jobs, it's also down to them having degrees in areas that just aren't in demand. For somebody like me I didn't go to Uni to get that piece of paper and use it as a magic key to get into a good job. I went to soak up knowledge and learn as much as I can to get better at what I want to do. The fact is with my degree being in an area where there are many jobs it puts me at more of an advantage compared to those with less practical degrees.

I don't want to name specific degrees that a lot of people consider "mickey mouse degrees" because sometimes certain ones get put down a lot, such as Art, which is actually a very useful degree to have if you are actually good at Art in the first place and did the degree to get even better - You can use this in all sorts of jobs from magazine illustration, website design and advertisement work etc.