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

[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.