Student Loan payments from Dubai

Princess_Jane

Hopefully this is the right thread!

Does anyone have experience of paying student loans while working in the Middle East?

My husband and I have just moved out there and he's trying to sort out his student loan.

The SLC in its wisdom have decided Dubai is a much cheaper place to live than the UK (ha!) and lowered the thresholds for repayment, so he's gone from paying £40 a month to being expected to pay at least £200 and perhaps as high as £600, depending on an assessment of his income.

This pretty much wipes out any extra income we've accrued by moving out here.

Has anyone had any success with deferring from abroad, or at least getting the payments down to a manageable level?

I must stress he doesn't want to avoid payment and contacted them voluntarily.

Mini_Bear

My sister works in Qatar and had to pay her student loan for the first year along with national insurance. Its just something she had to suck up. I would question the reason for the move if a tax-free salary was only going to make you £600 a month better off. Most jobs for expats in the middle east are professional roles and you should expect a serious increase in take home pay. I would negotiate with the employer to ensure any additional costs are more than covered by the salary offered.

Princess_Jane

Hi, this is the first time I've logged in since we moved. Yes, that busy.

We're having a lot of fun out here, but huge pay packets, paid housing and flights home are all long gone for most professions.

The cost of living is also very high, but we wanted an adventure and here we are.

mrsd

I agree with Princess Jane, we moved to Dubai for better moneylifestyle, within months contract changed, we now have to pay for housing, flights and utilities have gone up by 170%!! Kids and I have now come home as cheaper for us to live here and I now work. DH has had to stay to finish contract and pay back loan we needed to take out to pay for housing and car. We also had problems with student finance, they said we werent entitled etc. We have now heard from others out there that they dont declare the money they earn out that as its not overseas income that comes into the UK. We are struggling to pay 2 lots of living costs, and support DD through Uni.
Like OP we had great time initially out there and would not swap the experience and amazing chances our kids got.

Jackieboy

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