Best way to pay off student loans?

[CS Contracting]

its £9-11k a year + subsistence loan.

https://www.gov.uk/student-finance/n...ltime-students

£50k is not unusual.

The bit that annoys me is that the interest is so high. Its garnished from your wages so its likely to be paid. Also interest rates are about to soar.

https://www.gov.uk/repaying-your-stu...n/what-you-pay

I always find that paying off the highest interest rate debts first makes sense.

https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/sa...pay-off-debts/

Assuming you are earning contractor level cash i.e. 2* employee equivalent outside IR35 then saving a third+ a month for warchest for six months should give you a month or two of warchest but cutting your outgoings will make a big difference to the length the warchest lasts. (£50k permie = ~ £3k post tax ) a £450 a day contractor will have £5,530 a month.

Yeah the interest rate is ridiculous, especially to be charging people who want to get an education.

Im new to contracting, is that generally the rule? 2x your perm salary to go contracting? I’m not sure if it’s kosher to talk about money on this forum, but I turned down a perm role offer of £85k + 10% bonus + holiday, pension, sick pay etc to accept a contract role for £525/day outside. I’m hoping my day rate will increase in the future as this is my first contract role. But £525/day vs the perm offer I had probably isn’t worth the risk etc.

I’m definitely not getting 2x my potential perm salary at the moment, but with the tax benefits its still definitely more and as I say, hopefully the day rate will increase whereas the perm salary would be stagnant and has a ceiling (which I believe I was very close to with that offer)

[northernladuk]

Yeah, £50k is a lot, especially with it going up higher than I was repaying!

I don’t mind the system, higher earners pay it back, lower earners never have to. I do think the universities should be doing a better job though, for example, should we be letting 100,000 students take a sports science course if there’s only 10,000 jobs available in that industry? There’s alot of uni goers that go for the life style, which is fine, but it seems wrong to inflate the costs for others. £3k/year seemed reasonable. £9250/year is too much imo. It should be subsidised

Universities don't care, they are just after the money. Look at all the paid overseas places and these micky mouse degrees they offer etc. I don't think the ratio of grads to jobs is that much of an issue as many go on to do other things not related to their degrees anyway. It can be used as evidence you are at an academic level rather than the content of the course.

I do think these micky mouse degrees are a complete con though. The really niche ones like in comics and DJ'ing and the like. There is going to be even less jobs in those areas and people aren't really going to take it seriously if you want to get a job in a different area. Paying back a student loan with a micky mouse degree isn't going to be easy.

All that said my lad is at uni and his attitude is they will never have to pay them off so they aren't bothered. We've tried talking him through the numbers and reality of the situation but his peer group at uni has a very different general attitude to it. I know not all students think like that but there are large groups that do. Like many other things, when they hit the real world it's going to sink in but far too late.

[d000hg]

Apprenticeships! Especially for general IT and software engineering. I'm technically mentoring a final year apprentice (which is also final year degree) at the moment. The work she is doing is far above any of her uni work from what I've seen (they have no fecking idea about multi-threading in a pseudo real-time system).

I have a feeling the apprentice scheme got a bit of a kicking this tax year, after being quite attractive to employers the last year or two. We were looking quite seriously at it but unless the schemes vary between industries, the numbers don't seem to add up last time we checked.

[eek]

Apprenticeships! Especially for general IT and software engineering. I'm technically mentoring a final year apprentice (which is also final year degree) at the moment. The work she is doing is far above any of her uni work from what I've seen (they have no fecking idea about multi-threading in a pseudo real-time system).

Twin A is on a civil service degree apprenticeship - £25k a year with 1 day off (paid) for the degree work...

[psychocandy]

Bloody hell it was all grants and no tuition fees in my day.....
I remember £900 a term job done....

Son is 18 and planning to go to Uni in September. Aberwystwyth. Siarad cymraeg - you get money off if you do the course in welsh so trying to push him but hes not keen!
Halls of residence - £140 a week, Sure it was something like £25 a week when I went to college. Mind you this was three of us in shared room in Leicester 1986,

Times have changed? Well the bugger better get himself a job in tescos up there...

I think I'm going to be skint mind.

[SueEllen]

Yeah, £50k is a lot, especially with it going up higher than I was repaying!

I don’t mind the system, higher earners pay it back, lower earners never have to. I do think the universities should be doing a better job though, for example, should we be letting 100,000 students take a sports science course if there’s only 10,000 jobs available in that industry? There’s alot of uni goers that go for the life style, which is fine, but it seems wrong to inflate the costs for others. £3k/year seemed reasonable. £9250/year is too much imo. It should be subsidised

I actually had secondary school teachers with sports science degrees. (And I ain't young.) They taught Chemistry and Biology, or Chemistry and PE.

I also known/know other people with such degrees who work in finance including accountants.

In fact thinking of all the various people I know with degrees through my life, the only people I say wasted their time doing a degree are 18-21 year olds who do a Fine Art degree. Virtually every other degree I can think of people have easily transferable skills.

[DoctorStrangelove]

Long long ago, the other side of time, it was £90 a term full board single room at Loughborough.

The first year of HNC tuition fees in 1974 was £4. (I kid you not).

With the advent of the Labour Government, the 2nd year tuition fee was £140.

The current cost of a year's HNC/HND is £9k IIRC.

Stone me, I'm glad I'm an

3M gave day release for the HNC & endorsements.

Dear dead days beyond recall.

[vetran]

Long long ago, the other side of time, it was £90 a term full board single room at Loughborough.

The first year of HNC tuition fees in 1974 was £4. (I kid you not).

With the advent of the Labour Government, the 2nd year tuition fee was £140.

The current cost of a year's HNC/HND is £9k IIRC.

Stone me, I'm glad I'm an

3M gave day release for the HNC & endorsements.

Dear dead days beyond recall.

It was about £250 fees in the eighties.

I don't know why they allow the jumped up polys to charge £9k for a HNC.

[mattster]

Bloody hell it was all grants and no tuition fees in my day.....
I remember £900 a term job done....

Non-means tested living grants, no fees to pay and I believe you could even sign on between terms although that last part ended just before I went.

The cost of university is absurd now, you're looking at £60k minimum (fees and living) across three years, and even worse is the criminal rate of interest (I read 11%??!) on the loan. How can any of this be justified? Loans, OK, but surely at subsidised rate of interest, let alone an overinflated one.

As far as the old "graduates earn more so they should pay it back" line of thinking goes, I think you can look at this two ways. Graduates earn roughly £400k more over their lifetime than non-graduates, all of it at the higher rate of tax. So graduates are already paying nearly £200k more in tax over their working lives, more than enough to justify at least the fees component of their education IMO. If you were running the country as a business (not necessarily a great idea but that's another topic), then you would consider this a profitable payback on the cost of training staff.

[vetran]

Non-means tested living grants, no fees to pay and I believe you could even sign on between terms although that last part ended just before I went.

The cost of university is absurd now, you're looking at £60k minimum (fees and living) across three years, and even worse is the criminal rate of interest (I read 11%??!) on the loan. How can any of this be justified? Loans, OK, but surely at subsidised rate of interest, let alone an overinflated one.

As far as the old "graduates earn more so they should pay it back" line of thinking goes, I think you can look at this two ways. Graduates earn roughly £400k more over their lifetime than non-graduates, all of it at the higher rate of tax. So graduates are already paying nearly £200k more in tax over their working lives, more than enough to justify at least the fees component of their education IMO. If you were running the country as a business (not necessarily a great idea but that's another topic), then you would consider this a profitable payback on the cost of training staff.

My younger brother was in the middle where he paid some fees and got a loan, he is nearly 50 now and didn't pay his loan of till later in life as it was the cheapest loan he had. So it needs to be a significant interest rate when you are capable of paying it off. maybe set it as the base rate +2% until your salary hits the payback threshold then start charging the higher rate.