Student Loan - never debt free?

Sammy_Girl

Hi,
I have a student loan of about £6.5k and I only started making regular monthly payments last year. Mine is from about 10 years ago too. I used to defer it every year as I was always under the threshold, but last year was the first time that I was over the threshold. I am concentrating on paying my other debts off first becasue I want to improve my credit rating. As student loans don't appear on your credit report I'm not too bothered about overpaying yet. But I won't consider myself completely debt free until I have paid it off. I missed a couple of payments last autumn and they were hounding me worse than the DCA!! They even called my mum's old work friend who I must have put down on my form when I applied 10 years ago as a reference!!

jak

I don't even consider it a debt! It isn't on my payback agenda, nor do I think it will ever be...

oscar52

I aint worried about my Student loan. mine is about 12/13K. Although I earn over the threshold, there seems to have been a major error somewhere, as i dont seem to be paying anything off. To be honest, I wont be worrying about my student loan, ever.

southernbelle

I don't count mine as a debt.

Oldernotwiser

undersecter wrote: »

Say your starting salery is 20k once you graduate and you owe them 20k you pay back 9% so that is £150 a month which is a lot of money.

So what you can do and this is what i will do once or if i graduate stay with my parnets for a year then pay of all my studnet debt.

You pay back 9% of everything over £15,000 so if you were earning £20,000, you'd be paying back about £40 per month. Did you not bother to read the terms and conditions when you took the loan out? Paying back a £20,000 student loan in one year is about the most stupid suggestion I've ever read; are you sure you're suited to this education malarkey?

hayley_jayne

I haven't paid any since I started my new job 3 years ago and have no idea why. I work for a government agency and pay the right tax. I don't worry about it and never will. If they start charging me again in the future that will be fine but I'm in no rush to pay it back.

Gemmzie

I will definitely think of mine as a tax and wouldn't pay it off if I came into a lot of money either.

However, if you are earning enough and it's not coming out of your wages, that's your responsibility and the fines are nasty. So if you are meant to be paying it, pay it.

LilacPixie

My OH is in a similar position. He has around 3k outstanding but did not earn above the 15k threashold so has never really paid anything too it. I think the interest charged is around 5% which is less than our debt and mortgage.

If there is ever a time when we are debt and mortgage free then I guess we would look at paying it off but at the moment it doesn't even figure on our radar.

One thing i have notices in the threashold is split into a weekly amount so where as his annual salary is below the threashold if he does alot of overtime one week he may get a deduction of a few £'s

Northern_girl_2

hayley_jayne wrote: »

I haven't paid any since I started my new job 3 years ago and have no idea why. I work for a government agency and pay the right tax. I don't worry about it and never will. If they start charging me again in the future that will be fine but I'm in no rush to pay it back.

They didn't start taking mine when I started earning over the threshold too. I queried it with my employer though because didn't want to be landed with the back payment if there had been a mistake.

It turns out you have to tell your employer that you have a student loan and they tick a box to make sure that the payments start coming out. I had always assumed they would have a system to take it automatically like tax and NI but they don't.

If I were you I would query it with your employer too. I don't know what the repercussions are but it wasn't worth the risk for me!

Idiophreak

undersecter wrote: »

Well my cousin who is a neawly qulified teacher is paying back £75 a month and he earns just over 20k

This doesn't add up. On 20k he'd be earning 5k over the threshold - 9% of which is £450 per year - or £37.50 per month,

On 25k he'd have 10k over the threshold - 9% of which is £900 per year or £75 per month...

So either a) he's not earning 20k b) he's not paying £75 per month or c) he's paying the wrong amount. And I've never really heard of c...

On the subject, I find the amount of people who don't consider this real debt a little bit weird - I mean it's still money you've borrowed. Would people be the same way if they had one of these 3% for life deals on £10 - £20k of CC debt - would they just pay the minimum and forget about it as "not real debt". Not having a go, I just think it's an interesting way of looking at it.