Student loan interest rates set to drop in September - what you need to know - MSE News

My family is now enduring growing Scheme 2 student loan balances of over £100,000 which are already well on the way to being repaid because both (STEM) graduates whose names are on the loan statements are amongst the 1 in 6 most likely to repay loans and interest in full over 30 years, whilst at the other end of the living part of the family tree, we are completely unaided, enduring £65,000pa in care home fees and likely to have to do so for several years yet.

Are we perhaps unknowingly now a "middle class" family who were never daft enough to smoke or drink ourselves stupid on a frequent basis, and so deserve to have to pay, or are we just a family of three plus generations of ignorant wage slaves who never learned how to rip off our fellow countrymen?

Is Boris Johnson posh or a just pathetic sample of parasitic "creative ambiguity" mongers Britain can now offer the world via Eton and the like ?

Answers on a postcard, or below if it's easiest.

silvercar wrote: »

I think your problem is talking of the family as one unit rather than individuals.

I think your problem is that you scarcely have thought about your response and in respect of care home options you probably have no experience. The government relies on ignorance amongst peers to stifle outbursts of the truth like mine.

Those high earners with individual student loans of over £100k, will be paying 9% (or possible 15% if there is masters funding) of income over the threshold.

Students are definitely not high earners (they'd be lucky to be paid more than £20,000pa on internships and would probably simultaneously still be charged tuition fees of some sort if it was scheduled as part of their course). Plus a miniscule proportion of students even now will ever leave university with an outstanding loan of as much as £100,000, although with even 5.4% interest rates, £50,000 might become £100,000 in a few short years if there were no repayments - 13 in fact - unlucky for some slow starters. No my figure of £100,000 loan balance outstanding is the combined balance from two recent graduates in the family. Presumably when you read that, you will be asking what all the fuss is about?

Presumably that still leaves them with a large income.

News for you - I was earning £50,000 a year 20 years ago and I am no great shakes as an employable resource compared to the two STEM graduates I am talking about. I was well into my career before I got there.

Yet even the better graduates I am talking about won't be on £50,000 for a while yet (which is now a very ordinary salary for a prospective high achiever yet the great unwashed in the UK are now groomed to consider it to be a wonderful number if found on a 2019 salary slip!). Graduates already have to start paying back the loans as soon as their salary exceeds the peanuts figure of £25,725pa. Why? And unsupported, how will they ever be able to afford to get on the housing ladder like I did less than 2 years out of uni (remember - no great shakes either!)?

Those impoverished family members with 65k a year care home fees, must have the savings to support that

Yes and what actually happens when they have been bankrupted by care home fees?

... or they would get state help once their income drops below a certain level.

Really - what help? State help towards £65,000pa fees - show me please - where ?

If their care home fees are a struggle (maybe they are private care homes costing far in excess of the local authority homes?).

Are you familiar with the pits now masquerading as local authority care homes? Would you send your elderly family members to the pits? Are you aware of CQC reports on care homes? Even some of the £65kpa plus ones seem unable to escape amber "Requires Improvement" tags and meantime carry on doing their thing.

... then the options are to move to a cheaper home or ask those high earners with the student loans if they will contribute.

Instead of jumping two or three generations in the afflicted family to dump the burden of grandparent care on the youngest earners right at the start of their working life when they already have had student loans dumped on them, why not tax you and me at 37% and reduce the personal tax allowance by half i.e. introduce proper taxation instead of propounding myths and lies that we have systems that work and are fair?

Or might that not be fair on you perhaps who from the way you support the status quo surely much enjoys the £12,500 free of income tax and the 20% marginal rate above that? Certainly saves died in the wool "individuals" worrying too much about any family units with members who dare to want to be educated and then get old and need care, doesn't it?

UK has a stupid low wage, low tax economy. That's how we end up with families being burdened unfairly based largely just on the luck of the draw. It is not what the young twenty somethings of 1944 died for on the beaches of Normandy. Yet you make UK life in peacetime sound like landing on Normandy beaches. Like it's normal to get left behind in society, and luck of the draw as to who gets seriously burdened and left behind, and who doesn't. Many of your fellow foot soldiers fall face down in the water and you carry on because there's a war on and you blindly do what you've been told is right. But there isn't a war on. Low wages and low tax is wrong. Didn't anyone tell you that?

Apart from those with no scruples who get employed by the usual suspects in the City, what on earth makes you think that in UK, graduate salaries put any meaningful number of graduates each year into "high" earning categories? What's "high" in your book??

What's the highest annual income you've ever had to declare for income tax purposes? I've told you mine. It was £50,000, and it was 20 years ago.

Today's UK graduates essentially just land straight into wage slave categories where they suffer 6% interest rates on borrowings which they should never have been sold, and pay an extra 9% or even 15% on marginal rates of tax which you and I don't have to pay. Those are borrowing burdens which the taxpayer generally should be shouldering if the economy is being managed so badly that we cannot afford to educate our citizens without borrowings.

Are you blind to the wages stagnation of most of us in the past 20 years?

Why aren't you contributing to the elderly care of my relatives, and why aren't I contributing to the elderly care of yours? And of course, the same question is totally valid about your young relatives' university educations and those of mine.

The short answer is that the whole bloody country is the pits and it seems most are happy to remain unrecognised, unburdened with society, and untaxed behind the coaldust smears or whatever other anonymity or head down behind the parapets can be maintained to keep Jack alright, and Jack's money in Jack's pocket.