It took 10 years, three ex’s, two countries, and living with my mother for a bit, but I finally paid it all off.
Ask me how I feel. The guy who took my final payment on the phone was happier than I was
Made my final payment last year, felt so good!
Congrats - has it been a real game changer, or do you just buy fancier groceries now or something haha
I’m close to paying mine off so I will weigh in here.
Probably best to avoid “lifestyle creep”, this is money you haven’t had before now and it should probably be put straight into some investment, a stocks and shares ISA for example, or to overpay the mortgage (or save for deposit, so I guess that’s LISA these days). I’m assuming since you’re actually able to pay it off then you must be on decent money and you won’t “need” the extra couple hundred quid a month.
Other thing to realise is that the 9% over whatever amount you’ve been paying back was after tax. So I think there’s some decent argument to be made that you’re leaving money on the table if you don’t instead redirect a larger portion of your gross salary into your pension via salary sacrifice. Then instead of paying the tax man you instead significantly increase the contributions to your private pension.
I’m guessing the UK financial advice sub (or I guess “com” if there’s one here on Lemmy, sorry, I’m new here) would be a good place to ask.
Wow, good tips thank you. I guess I’ll start paying more into my pension. My pension is currently tied to my workplace, and I’ve always been wary of paying into it more just in case I can’t take it with me if I work elsewhere.
Is that the case? Can I take my company pension with me? Or that just stays in the company and I can’t take it with me when I work somewhere else
Most people have standard defined contribution pensions now. You can probably log into some pension companies site and see how much you have in there?
If that’s the case, then it’s your money (locked away u til retirement) that you can move to any pension provider you like.
You can ask your company to pay some of your salary into there - therefore you don’t get taxed on that bit of new salary (they might also match your contribution if you are lucky)
You can also just open a pension with another provider and pay money in. You will (eventually) get a bonis 20/40% tax refund paid in there too.
Congratulations 🎉
I look forward to my student loan getting written off (plan 1), there’s no chance of me paying it all off, especially given the interest is almost the same as my monthly payments…
My brother’s in a similar boat (almost triple digits), so he’s hiding out and waiting for it to blow over. I could have done the same maybe, but it would have been another 12 years and I was just sick of it.
Why did they do this to us? Sell us on the idea that the only way to land a cushy job was to go to uni, when there were barely enough jobs going around when we got out.
I hate this. I look at my parents generation with jealousy, they had no idea how good they had it
I remember when I was in college and they specifically took us to another campus, they were talking to us about university. It was basically sold to us as if “it’s practically a free loan, you’d be silly not to get it.”
We were all around the age of 17/18. If a bank or any other service had done that to us there would have probably been massive repercussions, maybe there would have been something brought up about us being miss-sold a product.
Looking back I feel it was very predatory given we were so young and essentially in a vulnerable state while trying to decide our futures.
Predatory is the right word. We were literally still kids, and they asked us to make a huge financial decision that would impact us for the rest of our lives…
I’m not being funny but if it’s impacting you this much you must be earning a significantly above average wage, no?
I’ve been paying off my (plan 1) loan for 17 years near enough and it hardly makes a dent in my payslip.
Plan 1 or Plan 2?
Plan 1, I was one of the lucky ones
Ah, lucky indeed!
