Student Loans Company - still owe 15k over 12 years later...?

littlegreenfrog_2

Pablosammy wrote: »

Get yourself on http://www.studentloanrepayment.co.uk/portal/page?_pageid=93,3866794&_dad=portal&_schema=PORTAL and get on top of things. You'll be able to download your previous annual statements which should let you spot if anything is wrong.

Definitely check the website - you may need to find out your customer reference number first - but be warned. Not all the correspondence is available to download (mine shows when paper statements were sent to me in the post but they aren't available to download electronically) and even if you can see what the SLC thinks you paid, their figures may not be correct.

Have you kept your payslips since you started working? If not, can you remember what your salary has been at each point since you graduated?

My advice would be to start a spreadsheet recording how much you think you have paid each month since you started paying your loan off. If you have your payslips this will be easy. If you don't but you can remember what salary you were earning and when, you should be able to work it out using a tax calculator tool such as www.listentotaxman.com (remember to enter the correct tax year each time).

It's a fiddly job, but once you've built up a picture of how much you think you paid off each month, call the Student Loans Company and ask them to go through your records and make sure they have everything.

I did this a few months ago and found that they were missing records of about £560 worth of repayments. I had two jobs in that tax year and a period of unemployment in between the two. HMRC originally notified them of the correct figure, but then sent them a revised notification which only took into account the first period of employment. This is despite the fact that I did actually make repayments during the second period of employment, and was employed by the government at the time! (Not by HMRC admittedly, but still.)

The point is, you may have overpaid. Lots of people do, and many of them probably never find out. The only way you can be sure you haven't overpaid is to go through your records with a fine toothcomb.

Dird

The website doesn't let me download previous statements =/ apparently they were mailed instead

It depends on how crazy your debt was to being with though. I started with £10k only as I studied locally

djlevackio

Dird wrote: »

The website doesn't let me download previous statements =/ apparently they were mailed instead

I recently got to the end of repaying mine and they had a whole year of repayments (2014/15) missing from HMRC's records. I wondered if any previous years had been missed too and as I'd lost some paper statements (and ridiculously, while you can download random letters on the website you can't view statements) I asked them to post me all of them going back to the start in 2002.

They did, at no charge, in about 30 separate first class mailings.

So, that's where your money is going!