Be Excellent To Each Other

I'm a right little thread-maker today.

Just out of bored interest, who has a student loan? After hearing nothing from the SLC for years they've gone a bit funny and sent me 3 statements in the last couple of months, cheerfully telling me that money paid via tax ages ago has now reflected on my balance and I only owe about £9500 now. I think when I originally calculated this shit I was due to probably pay it off in about 2013, assuming I earn between now and then.

Anyone else got experience of the SLC or found a way to check their balance other than just waiting interminably?

No, they SLC's just shit.

I just worked out my end date (5 years from the april after graduation, I think), and didn't care about my balance until then.

I have a student loan. Five figures of fun.

The SLC has a crap website where you can check stuff. MAYBE.

Yeah I got a statement a week or so back. Owe just under £6,000 now. I don't keep track of it at all, just open them up, feel vaguely sick, then throw them away. Apparently they haven't worked out how to stop taking money after you've paid it all off, so it's worth paying more attention when you're almost clear.

From what I understand you have to overpay for the rest of the tax year until they realise you've paid it off, and then you ask them for the money back. Stupid, no? It's like no other kind of loan in the world, on account of its crushing retardation.

FTFY

Is this overpayment thing for new rules (repayments collected through your PAYE, course started in 2002 or later) or old rules (repayments via a fixed direct debit, course started before 2002) students?

Bollocks to that, the interest isn't so amazing and the complete lack of interaction with the account and how monies are paid just makes it a bit shit. In many ways I'd rather it was a standard loan with 4-monthly statements and the option to payoff early. You can still do that with SLC, of course, but that wouldn't stop your tax payments coming out until they got around to stopping that.

I think the year you're thinking of Gaywood is pre and post 1998 isn't it? as I went to Uni in 2001 on it's the PAYE repayment system for me.

I still don't earn enough to have to worry about paying off my student loan - think it's something like £23k pa limit. (This is pre-2002 rules, mind. I think you pay on a sliding scale from a much smaller starting salary now, yes?)

Yes, I feel it's very generous that I get time to pay back money I shouldn't have paid in the first place and was the first year to have to do so.



Er? My course started in 1998 and I pay by PAYE. As Comical says I believe you'll find it's 1998.

WHISKEY TANGO FOXTROT. Please to be showing me where I can take out personal loans for RPI-level APR.

Well, I dunno much about the tax payments stuff. The scheme I'm on is just a fixed sum each month through direct debit and is always calculated to pay off in April four years after repayments begin (or six years if you have more than four loans).

Yeah, it is. My error is because I started my undergrad degree in 1998 (I am an "old rules" SLC student) but started my PhD in 2001. I had the wrong degree

Yes.

Now you pay off 9% of the difference between what you earn and the threshold which is currently £15k (used to be £10k), per annum.

So if you earned £20k a year you'd pay off 9% of £5000 a year, equating to about £37.50 a month as a deductable on your payslip.

I often use this method to find out what people earn by simply asking them what their SLC repayments are like, and I just work it out backwards, hahaha, silly people

Worth knowing, ta. I pay £125ish a month off mine under the old rules.

The irony of this system is, if you have a particularly large loan but earn *just* over the threshold, your repayments won't even cover the interest. As the loan gets larger over time, you have to hope that you eventually earn enough to decrease the overall balance.

Instead of faffing with repayments I just tightened the old belt and paid mine off all in one go a few years ago. Low interest is still interest, and it's my money and I've got better stuff to spend it on than the SLC's profit margin.

Due to an admin fuckup when I went to Uni (for four years in total, staring 1997), half my loan is on the old Direct Debit system and the other half is on the PAYE system. For whatever reason, I'm deemed to be not earning enough to have to pay back the old-style loan yet, so I've just recently deferred that for another year, but the PAYE one keeps getting paid whatever. Worryingly, I have absolutely no idea how much I owe on the PAYE one either, I can't remember the last time they sent me a statement.

Ah. SLC. That's the debt I don't worry about. Yet.

Because I was curious, I contacted them in 2007ish I think to get them to send me a recent statement. They did, and it was statement No. 4 dated 2005. I can only assume they had generated no statements in the meantime, which might explain why I've had so many now. Worst system ever.

I seem to get one every year now, although the most recent said something like Statement 7, despite me only ever having seen 4.

I think I've had a statement off them once a year since I graduated, to be fair.

I forgot to defer once year, so had to pay off one monthly payment. I think it was about £90.

Yeah, they were at one point, 18 months behind.

Which means you were getting statements about payments you made as much as THIRTY months previously.

I think they do something slightly odd, like they never see your money until after the end of tax year, when they get it all in one big chunk from HMRC and work it out backwards.

I do know a mate used to get endless requests for a final payment of 1p from SLC, which always shows a well organised company.

I got slightly worried when they flogged half my debt off to another company, which seemed terribly out of order given that I hadn't chosen to get into debt with some scummy private sector loan sharks. Yet another reason why I paid the lot off as soon as I could.

Anyone else find their student loan debts have been sold off? I think it might explain why I went a period without getting many or any statements.

I'm pretty sure everyone's were, excluding ones from 1997 or earlier.

I had a student loan. To be honest, you barely notice the repayments and I'm glad I took the money when it was offered.

See the tax calculator and tick the Student Loan box to work out how much you'll pay relative to your wages. It's entirely accurate, as well.

http://www.listentotaxman.com/index.php ... w%5B%5D=wk

Is this site wrong then?! I've been using those figures it's given me to calculate MY ENTIRE LIFE for the next year or so... ;(

That's entirely correct. £630 is 9% of £7000.

I think of the SLC as being like a lit firework that hasn't gone off - leave it alone or it'll blow up in your face. I've heard so many horror stories from friends about it* that I'd rather not risk confusing them.

How can a company so grossly incompetent be allowed to continue?

(Remembers which government put the system in place.)

Oh.



*Phoning them is an exercise in futility, as no-one who works there seems to be able to tell you their own name, let alone anything else. Their records are always a year out of date, for some reason, and they're incapable of telling you how much you owe now, but can only tell you how much you owed at some point last year. They lost the records they had on one girl I knew and refused to believe that she'd paid anything at all (this was after she'd paid the whole lot off), and one of my friends seems to have ceased to exist, as far as they're concerned, because she hasn't paid anything in years and the loans company refused to look into the problem.

The SLC's attitude to customer service seems to be the same as most other government departments, you have to use us whether you like it or not, so fuck it, we'll make you do all the running.

My student loan would have had about £1500 outstanding for this year, I pay rough £450 a month, so that would have meant me overpaying about £4000 over the year.

For me to pay it off early, I had to produce a years worth of pay slip to show what I had paid for that year as their information is so out of date (apparently their data is updated once a year by the HMRC). This also explains why every statement I received was at least 6 months old.

Even then, they could only give me an estimate of what I should pay to clear the balance. After paying this, they then told me that it takes a few months for the HMRC to stop taking the money, so I was still having to pay out every month. Thankfully this only took 2 months, although I have still to receive this over paid month back.

The best bit though is that, about a month after me paying off the balance, they took another £1500ish payment off me. I got in touch with them to find out why they were still taking money off, despite the fact that collecting payments is the job of HMRC unless I specifically authorise it, and why they had retained my details. They're helpful response was that they were aware there was an issue but didn't have a clue what it was.

To top it off they couldn't even guarantee that it wouldn't happen again. Cunts.

Unexploded firework, man. Keep well away.

I now have an arrangement with the Bank Of Scotland, if they do it again it will be treated as bank fraud.

Otherwise, I would have just closed the account.

in my country parents pay for their sons studies. In UK parents hate their sons

I'm really grateful still to my mum, whom slipped me a cheque for over five grand when I started university.

I've been deferring my loan since I graduated in 2000, so it's up to about ten grand at this point, I think. Given the exchange rate between the Pound and Canadian dollar, and considering how little I earn, there's no way I could make repayments.

They've only ever screwed up once with me - there was one year when I didn't get a deferment form at all, just a letter telling me that since I hadn't deferred, my repayments would be starting, er, the following week (they sent the letter surface mail, the clots). Thankfully I still had a few quid in my UK bank account, so that covered the first payment, and a quick phonecall to a very helpful (astonishingly) chap in Glasgow got the requisite forms sent to my parents house (I just so happened to be going back to Scotland for a visit the very next week, handily). Once the forms were sent in they deferred the loan straight away.

Since it's blatantly obvious I'm never going to be able to pay it back I'm kind of vaguely hoping that at some point they'll just give up and write it off.

This is probably truer than you realise.

Or not, of course.

Also - what Acey said.