Think about students in the US – they have to pay an average of $393 per month which is about £320 which is 20% of the average US household income.
In the UK you only have to pay 9% of what you earn over £25,000 for Plan 2 (Sep 2012 onwards) which means you wouldn’t have to pay £320 a month until you earned £67,000 a year at which point £320 would be around 6% of your income! Under Plan 1 (before Sep 2012) you would have to earn £60,000 a year before you would have to pay as much as £320 a month which would be around 7% of your income!
UK student loans are written off after 30 years so there is no need to rush to pay them off as the interest rate of 6% is lower than any other kind of loan you can get apart from a mortgage! US student loans are never written off so the sooner you pay them off the better!
Also in the UK a student loan is not counted as a debt for the purposes of deciding your credit rating for any other kind of loan including a mortgage!
In other words in the UK the size of your student loan makes no difference to how much you may have to pay per month and if you don’t end up with a really good job because of it it will hardly cost you anything! For example if you end up earning only £30,000 a year it will only cost you £37.50 a month (Plan 2) or £90 a month (Plan 1) and after 30 years you won’t have to pay any more. Many people pay more than that for their mobile phone contract per month no matter how little they earn! Lol
