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Borrowing for university
Former Member
Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
Apart from tutition fees, maintainence grant and maintainence loan, how else do students borrow money? Or do most find this covers all costs, because I've done my figures and I'm over £1000 short :nervous:
Post edited by JustV on
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If you're really struggling then you may be able to get a hardship grant from the uni.
Generally you put the fees to one side, as you don't have to deal with those as such. Your maintenance loan should just about cover your rent and then some combination of maintenance grant/parents/jobs/scholarships/sponsorhips cover your day to day living costs.
My maintainence grant and loan don't cover my accomodation costs though, for that I'm about £700 short. The only accomodation left when I applied was the more expensive stuff. I've had a part-time since i was 13, so I'm happy to get another one at uni. Are they relativly easy to come by? I guess there's a large demand for them.
Assuming you're not on a vastly different system to me then you should be getting at least £3k a year maintenance loan.
If you've got something posh in the accomodation lines at the moment and it's looking like things are going to be tight then get in touch with the accomodation office now and ask to be put on a waiting list for something cheaper. Room availability changes a lot mid August.
How easy jobs are to find depends on where you're at uni, what you are after and what skills you've got. Most uni's have a job shop type place which is a good starting point, and then you can also go around town applying for jobs and putting your CV in places like any non student would.
The key is to do it as soon as possible, if you've got time over the summer get CVs sorted now for bar work, shop work and general temping (and anything else you may want to do) then you can apply as soon as you get there and try and beat the majority of people.
I get just under £300 a week (once I get the tax back) for my summer job, that quickly makes up the short fall. To get that though, I looked for placements and internships and summer temp jobs in Feb/March.
That is presuming one does not have to pay rent and bills. Not all students can go home and live rent-free in the summer.
I'm having to pay roughly £4,700 for a shared-ensuite in halls. Which seems a hell of a lot to me. I did apply for a standard study bedroom, sharing a bathroom with 5 other people, but they were all taken, so I ended up with my third choice. At the time I applied, I called my uni's accomodation office and asked to be put on waiting lists etc, but he said it would be unlikely that they would change me. Which doesn't really make sense, as I'm sure that after the results lots of people will be changing their first choices :eek2:
I suppose it's worth calling again really.
Is that catered?
My second year won't be in halls, and will hopefully be cheaper...hopefully.
If it's that much including all bills and food etc then that's not so bad.
From my reckoning, for a shared ensuite in fully catered halls thats not outrageous. By being fully catered and having the shared ensuite things are a lot more expensive than somewhere self catering with a shared bathroom would be.
So other than the maintainence grant and loan, the only other way really of paying for this is by getting a part time job? Which I was planning on doing anyway, I just don't want to miss out on another form of income that's available.
Remember that if you get a student bank account you usually get £1k of interest free overdraft, although if at all possible I'd try not to use that long term as you'll probably find you'll need it to pay your rent etc when they ask for it before the loans come through.
I'm doing English, so there's nothing really available related to my course because it's so popular! An overdraft sounds good; I need to look at my bank's student packages.
My uni were daft enough to give me some training on various things to try and make me useful to 6th formers and am involved in doing Access work as well as having gone through it all myself.
When picking a student bank account, you want one with a reasonable big interest free overdraft, that has a bank on your campus and that the bribe will be of some use to you.
Much as I hate them, NatWest are pretty popular, the free railcards are handy, they tend to have branches most places and the over draft limits are usually some of the best.
Do also remember that while you may have to get you loan paid into your student account, you're not then obliged to use it much if you're happier to continue with whoever you use at the moment.
Ah, well it's been tres helpful! :thumb:
I don't have a student account at the moment, just a regular current account, which I have used the details of to fill in all my finance forms. So my loan/grant will get paid into my current account. Can I just change all that in September, so it goes into a new student account? Because I think it'll be easier to keep all my money in the one place.
They can be useful for the overdraft, and some insist you pay your loan in, others don't.
If you can find one you like that does it, I'd get a student account with a nice big free over draft so you have a kind of 'buffer zone' and then use your current account for everything else.
Another thing that suits some people is to use their student account for uni expenses, and their 'proper' one for everything else. Can make it easier to budget and keep track of money and where things are going.