student finance- Uni costs- help please! 4 February 2018 at 6:10PM in Student MoneySaving 4 replies 1.3K views

queenbee22

Hi there

My daughter is planning on going to University in the autumn. I think she will be eligible for a student maintenance loan of under £4000. Is everyone entitled to this?

Is it expected that we will bring her maintenance loan up to the maximum £8430 that some students receive or is that discretionary?

The cheapest accommodation at her prospective university is £4200, would we be expected to give her another £4230? Is that necessary? How much do 1st year students need? What do other parents give on top of the cost of the self catered accommodation? what is a suitable amount?

Many thanks

Ed-1

queenbee22 wrote: »

Hi there

My daughter is planning on going to University in the autumn. I think she will be eligible for a student maintenance loan of under £4000. Is everyone entitled to this?

Is it expected that we will bring her maintenance loan up to the maximum £8430 that some students receive or is that discretionary?

The cheapest accommodation at her prospective university is £4200, would we be expected to give her another £4230? Is that necessary? How much do 1st year students need? What do other parents give on top of the cost of the self catered accommodation? what is a suitable amount?

Many thanks

The maximum for students living away from home outside London will be £8,700 from September 2018:

http://qna.files.parliament.uk/ws-attachments/801692/original/Higher%20Education%20Student%20Finance%20for%202018.pdf

Whether the parents top it up is discretionary but there is an implicit parental contribution if the parent's income means the student can borrow less.

Dobbibill

Maybe your daughter could look at getting a PT job to help herself too.

zagfles

See section 11 of Martin' excellent guide (based on this acedemic year's rates, add about 3% for next year): https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/students/student-loans-tuition-fees-changes

My daughter ended up with over £11,000 in loan and bursaries - she found that was easily enough to live on (think she'll be saving about £3k of it). There's a real divide at uni between those from "poorer" households and those from richer ones, those from poorer households get the full £8k+ "loan" plus usually bursaries on top, whereas those from richer household whose parents don't make up the loan may get under half that and need to find part time work.

Note you can reduce your assessed household income through making pension contributions.

Spendless

I'd also have a read of this about the maintenance loan and how the amount lent is to do with household income.

https://blog.moneysavingexpert.com/2016/09/02/how-much-are-parents-supposed-to-give-their-children-when-they-go-to-university/

My eldest is looking at going to Uni in the Autumn and will get the minimum loan, think it's just under £4K.

We told him how much we'd be able to contribute in the first year, but after that he'd need to get a p-time job.

The first place he looked at, the cheapest halls accommodation (on this year's prices) was £6,300. We said we'd pay that.

He's since looked at another place he likes equally as much but it's in a far cheaper area. We'd make the same offer to cover his first year's accommodation, but if he does choose there, it's likely we could afford to subsidise over more years, we have a younger child as well, so we need to take that into consideration when deciding how much financial help we can give DS.