I just bought a Ps3, 360, £2000 computer and a 40" plasma screen with my Uni grant!

i worked from leaving school as my ema..

im glad, i cant believe people at uni, some of them have never worked at all... how ?!

im glad i come from a naff area in some ways :) but even though ive worked since school im no better off at uni :P
 
[TW]Fox said:
See this is what annoys me. Why on earth do you get a £2750 grant? I don't get that.
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Because I have been supporting myself financially for over 6 years paying N.I and Tax.

The Government is trying to encourage more mature student back into education , and when you haven't had mummy and daddy to help you out for the last 18 years that you have been living at home paying no rent, council tax, bills, food or other expenses, £279 a month of normal student loan doesn't quite cut it.
 
My parents are just above the grant section as well, sucks as it means i never had any cash throughout school (lived in too remote an area to get a job + i cant drive yet), where as id see my friends throwing away £30 a week because they couldnt be bothered to show up ? :(

Im going to uni this year, and will have the loan for my tuition and the other loan will just cover my accomodation, how im guna be eating stuff ill never know, it pretty much puts me ina situation where i have to beg for cash off my parents, or work solidly throughout uni (which my uni's already said would be a really bad idea).

How can i become independent when the governments assuming that my parents will help ?

At one stage all 3 of us will be at uni too as my brothers doing a 7 year course, how on earth my parents will be able to cope i dont know... but those 8p noodles are looking really good :(
 
DavidB said:
Im going to uni this year, and will have the loan for my tuition and the other loan will just cover my accomodation, how im guna be eating stuff ill never know, it pretty much puts me ina situation where i have to beg for cash off my parents, or work solidly throughout uni (which my uni's already said would be a really bad idea)
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This is why I stayed at home - with no grant, no fees loan when I started, having to pay the max fees with no LEA support, and not even qualifying for maximum loan there was simply no way in hell I could afford to move away to Uni without my parents paying for loads.

I wasn't prepared to do that. Uni was MY decision, It shouldnt be up to them to bankroll me through.

So I stayed at home. Financially speaking staying at home worked very well, so thats fine, but it would have been nice to have the choice.
 
lemonkettaz said:
i cant believe people at uni, some of them have never worked at all... how ?!
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I graduated without ever having worked (so my first ever job was at 21). I valued my free time at more than the kind of jobs available to people with zero experience were paying.

Of course this meant that I had to take out a student loan, and run down my savings, but in general I was quite frugal at uni. Rarely went out aside from the (cheap) hall bar, bought mostly cheap food and hardly anything in the way of gadgets aside from a few computer upgrades.
 
I must admit my parents do pay a pretty hefty amount to support me at uni. They pay my rent and my tuition so my loan is enough to cover general living expenses and socialising. Doesn't leave much to splash on expensive toys though. However I've been working this summer so now I have plenty of money to buy stuff with :D Since my loan almost exactly covers living expenses + nights out every now and then all the money I've made this summer is free for me to spend.
 
manic_man said:
No the unis COULD stagger the costs, by absorbing them themselves and offering required reading material to the students on a monthly payment system.

My experience of things such as reading requirements is that lecturers pick 3 or 4 texts as they feel they have to but then never truly identify which are essential. I for one never bought a single "required" course text book and found the notes provided to be more than adequate.

I think its easy to forget as students we are paying the universities near on £3000 a year now (well i didnt but new ones are). In research instititutions, students, especially undergrads, get lost in the system and are literally treated like cash cows.

With a bit of financial jiggery universities could easily ensure that first year students were able to access everything they needed even though they "only" had a monthly payment.
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It really depends what course you are on TBH. A very theoretical based course such as computing, maths and even english can have the costs staggered more than other courses. Recommended reading can be borrowed or just not read. I personally have only bought three books in the first year, one £50 book and 2 £10 books, all absolutely essential as they are used all the time.

My faculty also subsidise our field trips by £300 a year, meaning both field trips last year were free to us and the one this year is only costing us £50. Next years one is likely to be in the £100's even subsidised, they also provided us with over £100 worth of kit at the beginning of the first term. Just as an example this years fieldtrip is only costing us £50 but the equipment list will probably cost a few people a couple of hundred pounds if they don't have any of it. This is similar but even more expensive for the first field trip, I had a lot of it but it still cost me over £300 for most of the essential kit. Others it cost even more, the universiy could subsidise by buying kit in bulk but a lot of the kit is stuff that needs to be picked by the person wearing/using it.

The faculty also stagger the costs as much as possible over the first year but they cannot possibly do it well enough to remove the problem completely, the lecturers (at our uni) do know it is a strain on our finances and do try and reduce that.

I know my course is probably slightly different to most courses (Geology) but there will be a large minority of students in the same situation, if you only have to buy books think yourself lucky. This is why monthly payments would cripple people on courses like mine and why the loan payments even now caused a struggle. I then ended up with over £800 to spare at the end of the third term. Go figure...
 
[TW]Fox said:
I wasn't prepared to do that. Uni was MY decision, It shouldnt be up to them to bankroll me through.

So I stayed at home. Financially speaking staying at home worked very well, so thats fine, but it would have been nice to have the choice.
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Same, my parents wanted to pay my fess, but IMO thats just far too overkill. Im living at home, and luckily i dont pay board (they wont take it, so i wont argue).

Financially ive never had so much cash.....ever. Between working, my loan and a £700 grant im probably raking in ~£7k a year.

When your a student your loan repayments are something you just dont care about. Officially im like £6k in debt now, but you just dont think about it when your cars in the drive, your playing on your PS3/360 on your HDTV and browsing OcUK on your laptop. I didnt go daft with my cash immediately upon getting the loan, but around January i realised i had pretty much everything i needed for the year so went a bit nuts. Basically im enjoying myself before I move out and have the worry of bills.

i cant believe people at uni, some of them have never worked at all... how ?!
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Well, some of them are very good at getting grants, my managers partner gets about £4k in grants then his loan on top (which pays for their trip to the USA that they are going on in 3 weeks). Your doing CS at Northumbria aint you? If you are then youll probably know the Thaiwanese kid (Neil)? He gets all his money off mammy and daddy who own a few factorys in another country. Another wins the odd bit here and there playing poker every week, i think he won about £1k whilst only losing about £300.

Personally i couldnt live without my job now, i love the cash and i enjoy working with the people i work with. Our place is more social than hard work really. Its only £5.35 an hour, but i love my free rentals, its great for filling in spare time :D
 
My breakdown is as follows....

Tuition, £3070. Tuition Loan, £3070. Great thats covered.

Maintenance loan, £3600 (max i assume? I'm assuming this as i know my mums income is certainly no more than 14k, and all her benefits for being a widow stop as soon as i'm 18 (work that one out)), just about covers my accomodation with 300 spare.

Grant: £1900, again i assume this is the max. That leaves me with about 2200 for approx 40 weeks living, minus my monthly mobile contract thats about £45 a week for food/travel/social. That is, in short not enough. Food will proabably set you back 15-25 a week, travel for me is 10-15 a week, leaving a tenner for socialising.

I've been working all summer and will of saved about a grand up (not full time i admit, but i value my time more than most jobs available to me!) and this will help a lot, but most will be swallowed up by my car insurance renewal in december along with books/resources.

University is a massively expensive luxury, and it needs to be treated as that. It does REALLY annoy me having friends coasting through uni money wise, and not putting effort into the course, don't know they're born! Two of my housemates have never had to work, and recieve 80-100 a week from there parents, aswell as there fee's accomodation being covered. I would say only one of my housemates (of 7) is in the same situation as me financially, the others are fine and dandy because of there families being in a banging financial situation, which i guess is fair enough but there lack of apprecieation annoys me.


Oh i apologise for any grammar and spelling its late and im half watching 24 :p.

In short, you need a part time job/savings before hand to help!
 
i get a loan to cover my tuition fees and just under a grand spending money (£830) i think to live off. So I pile up £2000 worth of debt each year. I do have a part time job however and could live off this quite comfortably BUT i work through the year at this, save the money I earn and then travel on it in the summer. I see this as the best way to spend my money as I'm using valuable time to see the world before I go into work at the end of university and (after a 4 year course) only have around 8 - 9 grand to pay off on what seems like exceptionally reasonable rates.

In the past 2 summers I've been to 14 countries accross europe.
 
I got through uni before the rise in fees came into force so am lucky in that sense but even so I have ended up with about £10k of debt at the end of the day.

Thankfully I was able to save a lot of my earnings during my 3rd year placement as I lived at home but even so those savings went very quickly when it came to paying accommodation costs etc for the final year.

People I know had a both far harder and far easier time ... it's just the way it goes I guess - some people will always be able top afford the luxuries and others will struggle to get by.
 
Personally when I was at uni, I used my loan etc to eat well and live reasonably; I was lucky enough to have parents who paid my rent, which I was really thankful for. Any money I had left over at the end of term I would put towards a holiday or something. Also worked pretty hard over easter and the summer, and any money from this would go towards PC/games etc.
 
cheets64 said:
Because they are stupid, just because you go to Uni does not make you Eisenstein over night, they are letting anybody in these days, they are just pushing up the country's debt.

Most of them don't have any life skills and have been living of mummy and daddy for to long.
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Thanks for that Cheets, once again you reveal your own stupidity, which only serves to make your post even more ironic :rolleyes:

Its not 'Eisenstein' but Einstein, and it is 'too long' not 'to long'. Also, you can't just sterotype an entire generation. That would be like saying all poor people are chavs or black people are the cause of crime, its plainly not true! From the lack of literacy in your post and the hatred in your tone I would suggest that maybe you were never able to go to uni yourself (maybe a lack of intelligence?) and that is why you come across as so bitter.
 
As seen in most examples in this thread, some people get an easy ride and others have to work damn hard for theirs.

Also, the people who have the easy ride still get to milk the system for all its worth and end up profiting from it, while the ones who work harder and have less advantage get dumped on.

Sounds like the story/meaning of life tbh. The rich get richer, have it easy and it gets easier. The poor get poorer and the ride to shaftsville gets harder and harder.

For the majority, lifes a bitch - then you die :)
 
nicktay2605 said:
From the lack of literacy in your post and the hatred in your tone I would suggest that maybe you were never able to go to uni yourself (maybe a lack of intelligence?) and that is why you come across as so bitter.
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I can't spell most things, make frequent typos, went and finished uni, how is spelling related to if you can go to uni or not? Just to point out you are replying to a post made on 19th Aug 2007... :rolleyes:
 
rsatd said:
I can't spell most things, make frequent typos, went and finished uni, how is spelling related to if you can go to uni or not? Just to point out you are replying to a post made on 19th Aug 2007... :rolleyes:
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Didn't you struggle at uni not being able to do all that? I suppose it depends on the course that you do, after all the priority in maths is not spelling! The date of the post is not important, it was a stupid, jealous comment so I am going to respond ;)
 
nicktay2605 said:
Thanks for that Cheets, once again you reveal your own stupidity, which only serves to make your post even more ironic :rolleyes:

Its not 'Eisenstein' but Einstein, and it is 'too long' not 'to long'. Also, you can't just sterotype an entire generation. That would be like saying all poor people are chavs or black people are the cause of crime, its plainly not true! From the lack of literacy in your post and the hatred in your tone I would suggest that maybe you were never able to go to uni yourself (maybe a lack of intelligence?) and that is why you come across as so bitter.
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meh, I wont lose any sleep over it.
 
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