Luke is 34 and works as a chartered surveyor in London. He went to university in 2012 and, like others from England that year, took out a new Plan 2 student loan.<\/p>\n
But unlike many other university courses his – a higher national diploma in building surveying at the University of Greenwich – was only two years long, with annual tuition fees of about \u00a36,000. Many students were facing annual tuition fees that had trebled from the year before, as the cap on the amount universities could charge rose to \u00a39,000.<\/p>\n
As a result, Luke left university with about \u00a319,500 of debt, compared to many who graduated with \u00a340,000 or more.<\/p>\n
Still, he found the interest being added on to what he owed “overwhelming”, and began making voluntary repayments from the get-go.<\/p>\n
“It was difficult to not focus on it and be stressed,” he says. <\/p>\n
Luke now earns around \u00a355,000 and owes \u00a316,800. He thinks he still would have paid off his loan before it was wiped, even without the voluntary repayments.<\/p>\n
“Who really knows what the future holds? But based on what I do know and what I do have control of, making early repayments will make a better future for me,” he says. “In six years’ time, if I have access to that amount of money above 9% of the threshold, then yes, that’s a huge amount of money that I can put to the needs of my, by then, seven- or eight-year-old child.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Luke is 34 and works as a chartered surveyor in London. He went to university in 2012 and,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":412446,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":["post-412445","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/412445","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=412445"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/412445\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/412446"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=412445"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=412445"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=412445"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}