Student loan question

[theone8181]

Hi guys I recently finished my open uni degree (yay), and now I need to start paying back the loan ( ). I currently earn 39,000, however my pension is salary sacrifice so I believe the government only "sees" around 33k (I sacrifice 16%). On the new scheme this means I'll only repay something like 40 quid a month which obviously means it will take a long time to repay.
My question is am I daft for wanting to throw a bit of extra cash at it now and again? My current loan is about 14k (only did the equivalent of years 2 and 3), obviously the interest rates are quite high at the moment, and I've created an excel spreadsheet (cause I'm sad and like numbers), and it's going to be about 20 years if I don't overpay, assuming the interest rates stay high (bit of guesswork involved here).
We do normally get quarterly bonuses at work of maybe a few hundred a year so my thought was just to put that towards it to chip away at it. I'm thinking of it a bit like a mortgage so that compound interest makes a big difference. I think if I leave it the full time it's something like 10k in interest.
Annoyingly my boss has said I've got to jump through extra hoops to get a promotion and there's no payrise, which does make me think I've wasted my time.

 

[theone8181]

Oh sorry for reference I'm 37, although I'm aiming to retire at 55 (or 57 if the government get involved).
^ right now it's 7.1% for me, which is high, but at least it's not on 40k like most of the full time students (and will likely be never paid off).

 

[theone8181]

They do yes. Depending on which plan you're on. I think the newer plans the OP is on has a longer duration before being wiped. Based on his aspirations of retiring early it's likely he'll still be paying back the loan in retirement.

Yea that's my worry. That website was useful, but I didn't see an option for what overpaying would do.

 

[theone8181]

Just to update, my current role is a senior technician, but frankly I do engineer work anyway (which is what I want to be promoted too, but with a pay rise). I'm a bit annoyed that he said that, as other have had promotions and payrises (in other sections), and our department has had the biggest workload, with far more crap to deal with and pretty poor payrises (think I'm averaging about 3.5% for the last 2 years).
Getting back to the loan, the thought did cross my mind that I'd probably be better overpaying my mortgage rather than the loan as despite it being a much lower rate, its for a lot more (something boomers tend to forget ).

 

[theone8181]

Mortgage vs Student Loan is a tricky one. If you are currently on a low mortgage rate, when does that expire?

Ordinarily, I would advocate paying off the debt with the much higher rate, regardless of the size of loans. You'll end up with more money if you pay off your most expensive (highest rate) debts first. However, if you are on a fixed mortgage that will expire soon that could be a 'time bomb' in the sense that the rate will likely be a lot higher when the fixed term expires. So if there's a risk the mortgage rate could end up higher than the student loan rate you might want to try and reduce the amount owed.
Another factor is that if you lose your job you stop having to make student loan repayments which isn't the case for a mortgage. So student loan debt is very sustainable, it effectively just becomes a millstone that reduces earnings rather than a debt that must be serviced regardless.

Fair points. I've got 120000 left, at 2.5% for another 5 years so a bit tricky to judge.

 

[theone8181]

Not as clear cut as I first thought. Just another thing to throw in there, part of my mortgage comes off fixed rate in about 18 months (about 20k worth). I'm leaning towards overpaying that part (the remaining bit of my mortgage is fixed for another 5 years).