 Hello there. Hi. My name is John Hitchman. I'm a student advisor, immigration and finance and I'm going to be doing this webinar today which is a presentation, a brief presentation, probably about 10 minutes long about undergraduate student finance. So this is aimed at people that are starting an undergraduate degree so as in September this year. If you have any questions I'd appreciate it if you could keep those until the end probably about 10 minutes time but then we've got as long as it takes really to answer those. If there's anything really technical or complicated I might ask you to contact me directly and we can continue this you know one to one but anyway so without without more ado let's start the presentation. So first of all let's do a quiz. I hope you're all got your quizzing hats on and let's see what's the first quiz question. Ah it doesn't work. Okay my quiz isn't that exciting because as you can see the answers are visible I think because of the software that I'm using here. So this quiz is just to try and get you to think about how much things are going to cost when you start university. So there's a textbook as you can see to buy that textbook new of course you acquire a lot of money but obviously there are places like eBay or ABE books where you can pick things up for a lot less than the new price. There's the student staple diet hopefully not of course we encourage healthy eating but even with things like instant noodles you can see there's quite a price difference in different brands there for something that might be quite similar and then this is this is something important to think about if you've got your travel for for getting into university. If you don't live really close to Suras and you're going to live somewhere in and around the the middle of London then you start thinking about these sort of costs and budgeting for the year. So a weekly travel card that will allow you to travel for seven days in and out of London that cost £24.50 and you notice there's a star there as a student at Suras you can apply for a DTFL student discount so the £24.50 is actually 30% less than most people pay for a weekly travel card or for travel in London. Okay so there's another little price comparison for you so no need to call the answer because it's written down but yeah you can get some vans you know anything you know you can shop around we encourage you to look for bargains. When you get your student finance you're going to get a huge amount of money paid into your account it might be the first time you've ever had that amount of money and it's really important that you think about what's coming up ahead and what your costs are and what you have to spend that money on for the term ahead you know before you start thinking about things like a lovely pair of vans like that and so one of those costs would be the cost of halls of residence and you can see there's a massive variety in the price range there and it really you know you could spend more than £300 a week actually if you had that sort of money our halls are £164 per week that includes bills it's in the middle of that price range but the good thing about our halls is they're very local so they're within walking distances so as so if you have your room there you don't need the travel card you probably just need an umbrella it's like a 10 minute walk 15 minute walk in case it rains. Yeah some of the halls are a lot cheaper the £80 hall is out towards East Finchley so you'll be looking at spending that sort of £24 a week for the for the travel card. Okay so what we're going to do in the presentation today we're going to talk about the financial support that you can apply for from student loans. Generally this presentation is aimed at English based UK nationals okay but it's going to have the information for EU nationals and if you're from Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland we're going to point you in the right direction for that as well so a lot of the information should cover everybody except for those coming from outside of Europe to study so everybody else there should be something here for you. So yeah we're going to cover the tuition fee loan we're going to look at the different types of funding you could get to help with cost of living some additional support as well and then we're going to look at how you apply and also how you repay the loan and some other tips at the end. So firstly you know the good news and you're probably aware of this is that you don't have to pay your fees up so as you don't have to do that you can get a tuition fee loan from the government and this will cover the fall so as fee which is 9,250 for 1920 and that will be your fee rate for the rest of your course so you can borrow that loan and that loan you can get that for every year of your course if you're doing a three-year program or four-year program you'll get that fee loan paid every year and with loans you start repaying them once you've graduated or once you've started earning and then on top of the fee loan there's also a maintenance loan and this is to cover your living costs now some of this around about 40% of it is based on your household income but majority of it isn't so the maximum you can get if you live in London or if you study in London which you will be doing is 11,672 pounds so you can get a little bit less than that dependent on your parents income and if you're going to be lucky enough to be living at your parents home so maybe your parents live in London then the amount of money you can borrow is less so it's 7,529 the expectation hopefully is your cost of living is going to be a lot lower because you hopefully don't have to pay a huge amount of rent or maybe no rent at all living with mum and dad and then on top of the maintenance loan for your living costs as so as we also have bursaries and the bursaries are aimed at students from low-income families so what that means is you're at the maximum you're getting the maximum amount of maintenance loan and that's household income is less than 25,000 pounds and if you are in that category then you qualify for 1,500 pounds for each year of your studies and you don't have to apply for that bursary okay all you have to do is apply for student finance and be means tested now it may be that you don't want to take our maintenance loan okay it's not something that you want to do but you can still apply for student finance and be means tested and then you can say that you want to take zero loan and by doing that means test you could still qualify for the bursary so just because you take the loan or not it doesn't matter but it's based on your household income so if you don't want to take a loan you can still be means tested and still receive the the so as bursary and then if you have a look at our scholarships and bursaries website you can see other bursaries that may be available including one that we have that's aimed at displaced people so asylum seekers and those who are refugees into the United Kingdom so on top of those um bursary maintenance loan we have hardship funds here and those are funds that you can apply for if you've fallen into problems throughout the years you've got your other funding in place and you've got your oyster guard and you've got probably a bank account with an interest free overdraft so a student account you've got all that stuff up and running and then something happens you have a bit of financial difficulty then you can apply for hardship funds and we'll do an assessment of of your situation but if we agree that you're in hardship then you could qualify for some money you don't have to repay that would just be a grant okay now this is other money from student finance called the disabled students allowance and this is to help with the cost face for students who have a disability so to enable you to study on an equal basis with other students and anything you get from the disabled students allowance doesn't be paid and the amount you get doesn't depend on household income either so it just depends on your needs and this could cover things like specialist equipment from instance computer software voice recognition software perhaps maybe you need one-to-one support so we have study skills tutors here but we also have mentors so people that will help you with sort of life skills as well as study and it may help with travel costs if you have a mobility related disability and then also you could get help with costs like photocopying and printing so another type of funding you could get from student finance is if you have a dependent adult or dependent child and so they call the adult dependent grant the child care grant child care grant can help with the cost of registered child care so in a nursery or with a child minder that's officer registered and the adult dependence grant that will help you with the cost of supporting an adult family member who doesn't have any income off their own and probably that would be something that you're a carer for and then if you're a parent and you can qualify for the child care grant but you also get a thing called parents learning allowance and that's a grant that again you don't have to repay that will just give you some money because you're a parent in higher education and your cost may be a little bit higher than other students so as I said I'm going to talk about European students as well so as you're quite aware I'm sure the United Kingdom is in the process you know very slow process of leaving the European Union but during this process the government have guaranteed that any E-nationals started their program in 2019 will get their funding guaranteed for the whole of their program so that so as you could be doing a four-year degree your funding is guaranteed for the whole duration of that degree but there are different ways you can qualify for this funding and I think the tuition fee loan that's what you would get if you're an EU national that's just coming to the UK in order to study the course and probably you're thinking about leaving afterwards but whether you are or not you've just arrived just at the start of the course to study so you just get the tuition fee loan now if you're an EU national who's been living here for quite a long time so if you've been living here for five years before the first of September this year you can also qualify for the maintenance loan and you'll just need to prove that at the start of the course and then you should be able to get that every year now you might be an EU national who's been living here for a few months maybe living here now and you're living here in September the 1st and you're also going to be working while you study and you can qualify for the maintenance loan too whether this will continue for the whole of your program I think that's like slightly more up in the air so we know this will be the situation for 2019 should be for 2020 as well which has just been announced but we couldn't guarantee that you'll always be able to receive this funding once the UK well once these guarantees are finished after we've left the European Union so for everybody else so you'll definitely get the tuition fee loan and if you've been here for five years you can definitely get the maintenance for the whole course now everybody's entitled to this funding but the only thing that could affect you getting it would be if you have previously studied higher education and that could be something like a bachelor of the arts or bachelor of sciences so BA, BSc but perhaps something like a foundation degree if you if you you're a mature student maybe you've studied something like an hnd or 80 certificate or something in the past so those sort of qualifications could affect your entitlement to funding if you don't have an honours degree you may still qualify for some funding but if you have any queries this is the kind of thing we can definitely talk to you about but if you know things like your A levels or if you've done a foundation diploma normally, access courses, HE diplomas, ABC diplomas those sorts of things they shouldn't count so anything that's below degree level shouldn't affect your entitlement but even if you have one previous year of degree level funding that shouldn't stop you doing a degree in 2019. Okay so how do you apply online it's very straightforward you go to the gov.uk website and if you're a UK national then you just give the student finance england your passport number and your parents and i number and then they can check everything your identity and your household income it's a very quick application it'll probably take about 20 minutes to do and then how about repainting the loan okay so that's something that you're going to need to think about over the years and so the way they describe it is they say you're eligible for repayment from the April after you leave or graduate from university so you tend to finish around about now is the end of our undergrad term and so we'd be thinking students who are graduating this year would be looking at repay starting repayments in April next year and you only repay money a percentage of what you earn over 25 725 so if you earn less than 25,725 pounds you don't repay anything then if you earn over that amount you pay back nine percent of anything over the amount that you earn so and that money's taken directly from your taxation so when you pay your tax pay PAYE it's called you pay as you earn when you see your pay slip you'll see things are deducted from it maybe you're paying a pension contribution but also your national insurance will come out and then you'll see a deduction as well for your student loan so essentially it will feel like you're being taxed a little bit more because of your degree and to give you an idea of what those repayments look like so you can see that it's only really once you're starting to earn a considerable amount more than the 25,700 that you're paying back a 27,000 you're paying 15 pounds a month and a 30,000 you're paying back 37 pounds a month so it's never going to be difficult to repay and if for some reason your working situation changes you just keep student finance updated and that they if you fall below that threshold they won't expect you to continue repaying okay how do you make your money last we've talked a little bit about this but a good website to use is the Brightside calculator that helps you budget for the whole year so that's something that you should be thinking about now you know thinking about how much loan you might get if you apply for student finance quickly you can get an answer from them and then look at that and think i'm going to have to budget out over the course of the year you know a lot of undergrad students will get some sort of a part-time job while they're studying to just make a little bit of extra money but there are some simple things you can do so you're choosing a student bank account probably the best reason like student banks will be very keen to get your business when you're a student because generally people stay with their bank for a very long time but I think the key thing you should really be looking for from a student bank account is the size of the interest-free overdraft and you can compare those online look at websites like Money Saving Expert or Money Supermarket and really that would be the key thing you know if times are getting a bit tough on your student if you can borrow interest free that's a fantastic thing so some of those accounts will give you up to £3,000 that you can use for an interest-free overdraft now it's always a good idea to avoid expensive borrowing so obviously interest-free would be the best thing you can do but you know the key things to avoid borrowing on credit cards you could be looking at 25% on those store cards you know quite a bit more and then things like payday loans they're absolutely preposterous so 500 to a thousand percent even because they charge you by the day so we definitely avoid and advise you to avoid anything like that if you're having any problems with any of those things you know come and see us we'll get in touch with us and you can get things like the uni days card or any us extra which I think is now called the totem card and you get some amazing discounts with that so all you got to do is I think give them your university email address so as soon as you're here you can do that and then you're getting like massive discounts on food on the cinema and even on shopping at shops like Calp you can get 10% off your grocery shop so definitely up for one or both of those cards and then as I mentioned as soon as you enroll make sure you've got the oyster 18 plus card which will give you 30% off your travel around London so that's the end of my presentation thanks for listening if you've got any questions I'm going to stick around and answer those for you so I've got a question saying can you apply for the bursary if you've already applied for student finance so yeah essentially you you will be automatically assessed for the bursary if you've been means tested so you've provided your parents income details or you're over 25 or you're considered independent then that's fine you'll be assessed automatically for the bursary but if you haven't been means tested yet you need to do that part of the process so somebody's asking about sharing information so part of the application is the fact on the student finance application it will ask you if you are happy to share your financial information with university you have to do that in order for us to assess you for the bursary if you say no to that I'm afraid you won't be able to receive the bursary and the bursary is only available to English based students it's it's limited in that respect but as I said it's also limited to students from low income backgrounds so English based students from low income backgrounds and then someone's asked about student oyster card if you already have a regular oyster card my understanding is I think you get a new one I think you pay something like 10 pounds to get that card but once you've got it you can keep extending that each year you don't have to keep repaying every year but I think you extend that I'm actually not sure but um yeah there's one charge for the card once you have it I think you may get it for the duration of of your degree but you don't have to keep paying any money for that okay so not getting a lot more questions um thanks for listening it's been great but I think you're going to be sent a recording that you can look at again for future reference but um thanks for all being my audience and look forward to meeting you all um so as in September thanks a lot