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Student Loan

This weekend, I received my first letter from Student Finance since graduating. They said that my loan was due for repayment, beginning in April. They didn’t specify the amount, but I think it’s somewhere in the region of £21,000.

I don’t actually have to pay any of it back until I’m earning over a certain amount (£15,000 a year I think). Hopefully, I will be earning that amount by this time next year, but I’m already starting to think of ways that I could avoid paying the loan off.

  • If they call me, I’ll say ‘I already paid it off! I popped one lump sum cheque in the post.’ They’ll assume there was some kind of error on their end and write off my debts.
  • I’ll try on some Derren Brown mind tricks. I’ll turn up personally to their office and confidently hand over bundles of plain paper, claiming that they’re stacks of £10,000 in £50 notes. They’ll mark my loan as paid, and only realise the money isn’t real when it’s too late.
  • I’ll deliberately never earn over £15,000 a year. I’ll find a job that pays me a salary of £14,999 and then by the time I reach fifty years old, they’ll write off my loan and I’ll finally be able to move out of my dad’s house!
  • I won’t tell them when I leave the country to start my teaching job in Japan (actually hoping this last bit happens). They’ll hunt me down and send out international assassins/debt collectors. I’ll have to go on the run like Jason Bourne, but with better fighting skills. Eventually I’ll disappear, only to reappear back in the UK and take down the Student Loans company by myself. There will be some kind of big confrontation with the evil boss man.
  • I’ll get someone to inform the Student Loans company that I am dead, then I’ll go into hiding with only a select few people knowing of the truth. Months later, these people are attacked and I have to come out of hiding to stop a terrorist plot which aimed to implicate me in the attacks. However, when the terrorists are stopped, Student Loans track me down, kidnap me, and torture me on a boat for twenty months. Any resemblance between this and season five of ‘24’, which I just finished watching, is purely coincidental.

Or, I suppose, I could just pay it back like a good boy and be thankful that I had a chance to go to university for just £21,000 instead of triple that. But that’s boring.