Pre - 1998 student loan warning!!

ani*fan

Hi everyone. I just wanted to warn everyone about an encounter I had with Honours Student Loans giving me poor and costly advise, and make everyone aware.

If you have loans from before 1998, like me, you'll have a proper loan and not this graduate tax type loan that people graduate with now. If you got your first one the year they were offered, 1989, and you were a spring chicken of 18, then you'll only be around 4 years away from having the remainder of the debt wiped out at age 50. Possibly this only applies to Scotland, I don't know.

I do not want to get into any conversation about the rights and wrongs of repaying student loans. I am bound by the terms of my loan agreement and have been happily staying on the right side of those terms for many years. I have nothing else to say about that.

However, I recently began another period of repayment, and was advised to call back once the threshold increased in September, at which point I may have been eligible for deferment. This is not unusual, it's happened before and is good advice.

What was unusual is that the adviser said 'don't bother making payments before you send in your deferment form, if you're going to defer we can refund those payments anyway so just don't bother making them, we'll send you a couple of letters, they're automatically generated, your account will be in arrears but it doesn't matter'.

I made the payments anyway, happy to do it since the rules say I should. However, I have only just discovered that if I had allowed my account to go into arrears, on the advice of this young man on the phone, then all rules re. the loan being written off when I am 50 years old would be null and void.

I like playing by the rules with money. I will come to the end of this loan and have some debt written off. Those were the rules and I played by them. Many would have been glad for the reprieve and not bothered paying. The loan has rules and at the moment Honours Student Loans cannot be trusted to advise you of what they are.

Just beware. Obviously I have made a complaint. But I thought you guys should know too.