Debt-free!

[fivemack]

I have just paid off my student loan. Mine was the first year that had loans, at a highly uncommercial interest rate; I let the loan mature for four years while I did a PhD, and started paying it off at £125 a month in about June 2003. Now I can switch that standing order into savings, so that I never see the extra money to feel that it's there to be spent.

I think tombee, to whom I sold in the second year of my PhD the computer which I bought with my second undergraduate year's student loan, threw it away about three years ago; hardware dies, but debt endures.

Comments

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

Speaking of dead hardware, remember this?

"Remember, more computing power was thrown away last week than existed in the
world in 1982."

You have another version on a Web site.

What year are we up to now?

[jiggery-pokery.livejournal.com]

I loved that site of yours for years and checked it occasionally, if only for confirmation that processor speed changes have really, really slowed down relatively recently. (Not to say that processors haven't become capable of faster computing, or that the same money doesn't buy you more processors on the same chip than it used to.)

Also: yay, fivemack!

[lnr]

Um, you're younger than me, and I had student loans, in addition to a small amount of grant (in my first year anyway, after that I wasn't eligible). The interest rate was certainly un-commercial. I paid mine off last year.

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

Ah, I must have been in the first year without grants rather than the first year with loans, and thought those were the same thing. Wikipedia suggests that the SLC has been around since 1990, which is much earlier than I thought.

[lnr]

*nods* yeah, my mum had a student loan as a mature student in the early 90s. She didn't qualify for grants because she'd studied before at 18, despite the fact she dropped out after her first year first time round.

It was the fact she was a student the year before I went to university which meant my family's income was low enough to qualify for any grant at all, and it wasn't a huge amount.

[beckyc.livejournal.com]

No, you were the same year as me, and I had a grant.

Mine was for £0.00 per year, admittedly, but other people got a non-zero amount.

[uisgebeatha.livejournal.com]

*cries*

I've just started to pay mine off; I think only about 50-odd quid comes off my wages, so looks like it'll be a while before I'm debt-free... :/

[lnr]

You're new style, not old style. We had to pay ours off over 5 years, as soon as we reached a certain amount of pay, and they just take the amount you owe and split it over 60 months repayments, with adjustments for interest. Which means the repayments could be quite big if you owed a lot.

You start paying yours off at a lower rate of pay, but the amount you pay is based on what you earn and done automatically through PAYE.

[uisgebeatha.livejournal.com]

Ah I see. I'll stop lamenting now then. ;)

[hilarityallen.livejournal.com]

Congratulations! I shall feel unreasonably privileged that my parents thought it better for them to pay for my university education, rather than for me to be in debt.

[lnr]

I don't think my parents thought that amount of debt on those sort of terms was particularly a problem, they certainly gave me slightly more money than the local authority told them they should, and that did allow me to just scrape through the first year on grant, parental contributions and overdraft alone.

When my youngest sister Emily managed to be the first year of tuition fees my parents did pay those, allowing her to have a similar level of debt to me and Steph, on the principle that it would have been rather unfair on her otherwise. I feel sorry for people whose parents *can't* afford to make up the difference to allow siblings to have the same opportunities for the same costs.