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Banking stupidity....


andrew e

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I watched this last night, quite shocking really. The abridged version is that some student ran up a £40 grand debt on student accounts..... :shock:

 

Still hasn't paid it back 5 years later :lol:

 

Towards the end you see a fresher opening student accounts and getting £3500 in overdraft cash in her hands with 24 hours by opening 4 bank accounts.....

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00fvc73

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For sure being a student these days is more expensive than when I did it 11-14 years ago (what with tuition fees and stuff), but running up debt like that is just stupidity.I came out of three years of study with no loan and no overdraft, by shopping at Kwik Save, not drinking much, and working at the weekends. Oh, and driving a crap car (poo beige Volvo 340, which cost me a full summer's worth of 60hr weeks at a supermarket to buy and insure), rather than the BINIs etc that dippy student bints seem to drive nowadays.

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I watched this, quite an interesting programme. You would think that the bank who provided the 'everlasting' debit card would have changed their policies on this type of thing, apparently not!And they then moan when they are about to go bankrupt themselves!!

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40 large is Quite Alot. I spent several years hiding from the Student Loans people, with varying degrees of sucess. Eventually I had to give them their pound of flesh back (+ interest). I was pissed off because I wasn't all that far away from having the debt written off. Sadly a university education has been pretty much of fuck all use to me. In fact no-one has ever actually asked about it/checked it, employment-wise. I'd have been much better off not bothering I think.

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Sadly a university education has been pretty much of fuck all use to me. In fact no-one has ever actually asked about it/checked it, employment-wise. I'd have been much better off not bothering I think.

Bingo! I work with a number of folk the same age as me who didn't go - if I'd known what I wanted to do, career-wise, I would have headed out into gainful employment at 18 too. Once you get on the job ladder it's pretty much all about your work experience, certainly education becomes less of an issue the older/more experienced you get.
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I fall into this category! Not proud of it, but I was young and stupid.At age 18, and in first year at Uni, all these banks offered me accounts with 'free' money, overdrafts, credit cards; and also those student loans. Having never really had my own money before, I took the lot and used it to built a few cars/bikes, but also pissed loads of it up the wall :roll: Came out of Uni in about £25k down. The bit nobody tells you is that you can't walk out of Uni into a £45k job - it was £12k at the most! So struggling with amounted debt, plus being technically insolvent after paying rent and debt repayments, this £25k rose to £42k over the next few years! This was not helped by the fact that the banks were still willing to lend a naive and arrogant twenty-something more and more. And they gave me a mortgage on top of all this debt. In hindsight, I probably should have gone bankrupt really, but I have this annoying thing called a conscience, so have worked bloody hard over the last ten years or so to pay it all off. Nearly there now as well, and it feels great. I know I have nobody to blame but myself, but there is certainly an element of irresponsible lending the banks part.Will have to find some time to watch this show - it look rather interesting.

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Sadly a university education has been pretty much of fuck all use to me. In fact no-one has ever actually asked about it/checked it, employment-wise. I'd have been much better off not bothering I think.

Bingo! I work with a number of folk the same age as me who didn't go - if I'd known what I wanted to do, career-wise, I would have headed out into gainful employment at 18 too. Once you get on the job ladder it's pretty much all about your work experience, certainly education becomes less of an issue the older/more experienced you get.
Bingo++I work alongside people who wandered in off the street, via agencies, and do the same job for the same money.I too am 'hiding' from the student loans people though, the figure keeps racking up and I keep deferring it. It's not even that bad by todays standards, I had £1.5k a year for three years. I think to be fair I even came out of uni in credit, although I had nearly £5k debt I also had about that in savings, thanks to my weekend job and the lovely student grants they used to give out. I certainly wasn't £40k in the red. That came later, thanks to poor judgement in women :(
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The bit nobody tells you is that you can't walk out of Uni into a £45k job

Aye. Delusion re. starting salaries appears quite common still. And £45k p.a. still wouldn't generate enough mortgage size to buy much round here (if you were on your tod), which is why so many folk are in debt...I felt like I had loads of disposable cash when I was 21 and on £12k (living at home mind); certainly more than I do now - but then my outgoings were minimal then as real life hadn't really got in the way yet.
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Funny when you think about it.....I left school at 16, worked under the YTS scheme (slave labour) for about 3 months then got a job as an MOT assistant in a small garage which paid pretty well. I think it was £70 odd quid a week back in 1986 although the hours were quite long.Then took a job as a trainee paint sprayer with another local (Honda) dealer and by the time I was 20 I was earning £15-20k a year so could buy my own decent car, go abroad on holiday etc. Also meant I had plenty of income for the mortgage lending multiples so bought a 3 bed house in 1993 for £74,000.I then got fed up with the paint spraying and it's health issues so being of fair intelligence I then moved to financial services in 1995. I passed a good few exams giving me an FSA diploma qualification and earned £35-40k as a financial adviser.However, the high pressure sales tactics didn't sit well with me and after my dad was very ill in 2001 I packed in the selling and moved to a pension administration role that paid fairly well with no pressures.Move on 6 years and we sold our £74k house for £243k - bought a bigger 4 bed detached house for less money in Cheshire and are now sitting fairly pretty with a nice house, £70k mortgage that finishes in 9 years and managing to get by on my girlfriends salary as a part-time PA.So, by age 50 we will be mortgage free (which is nice) and all I'm really wondering about is what fixed rate we can get when the current one of 5.29 finishes in July.And to top it all off I get to spend loads of time with my daughter which many people aren't lucky enough to do.Looking at the other posts, had I gone to Uni I would probably just be finishing paying off my debts and getting started on the property ladder.

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@ RetrogeezerThe thing they tell you is you'll be worse off in the short term if you go to Uni, but the gains later in life make it all worth while.Your situation is a perfect case in point to prove this is not the case. I think perhaps 30 years it was so, but with so many people doing the Uni thing these days, we're not err, special!I also have a couple of mates who have "reasonable intelligence" like myself who didn't go to Uni, and they are far better off than I'll ever be.Still, had sooo many good nights in the student bar :roll:

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Well, that is the other side of the coin.....I would have loved to do the 'gap year' thing and travelled around Thailand/Cambodia - I so want to go to Ankhor. Hopefully I will be able to in the future but I'm not even 40 yet and my knees are playing up (thanks to the paint spraying/prepping work).And to be honest, after seeing my dad almost dying at 56, then in a coma for 2 weeks and now confined to a wheelchair and unable to do anything for himself I kinda lost the ambition to build up a nice big pension as there are no guarantees you will get there to benefit from it.And I used to sell them!P.S - I hope I don't sound smug in my original post....far from it as I have worked hard and am well aware of how lucky we are. I also sit here thinking this is all too good and something has to go wrong at some point.

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I went to Uni back in 2003/04 but could only get a feeble loan on account of my parents circumstances, they're hardly rich but for some reason I was entitled to very little indeed probably because they both work. My total student loan came to a maximum of something like £2500. The Uni was nearby (Huddersfield) so I just commuted there every day, as I couldn't be bothered either getting a job or racking up a load of debt to go live with a load of stinking students. I was happier staying in my folks house.Conclusion: I got increasingly fed up and went into a selection of jobs I don't enjoy much, which are all under the repayment threshhold for student loans so it just sits there gaining mild interest and occasionally being paid a bit if I get backpay or something. Currently I work recovering debt for "the man", there has to be irony in there somewhere.

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I did a year at college doing an HNC in radio back in 1996, got a student grant of a bag of sand or so... As i was still living at home and up to that point had been on £3 a week pocket money i thought i was a millionaire!Left college and had a few crappy jobs until i got my first on air gig in 98, been doing it ever since.I dont see how uni would have helped me at all, in fact one of my mates studied his arse off for five years only to land a £14k a year job in a bank. Whats the point?I'm currently fending of a load of debt tho thanks to the fact that working in radio is classed as self employment, and so i have to sort out my own tax. Which I didnt. Now im slowly trying to pay it all back.The thing with that prog was that. he is never going to pay the 40 large back... just go bankrupt. These days there's not the social stigma there used to be with bankruptcy and in scotland as of last year you are only bankrupt for a year now anyway. I can see a lot more people heading that way in the near future. If i was suddenly out of work for any length of time it's what i would do.

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Urgh, don't even get me started on tax calculations. Even when I was on PAYE I still managed to bollocks it up. Well technically the inland revenue bollocksed it up actually, gave me a whopping rebate [which they were ADAMANT I was due, I wasn' sure!] , then 18 months later asked for it back. Twats.

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just about everyone i know in radio has bollocksed up their tax. its madness to think that people who play records for a living will be able to maintain full accounting and tax records.Every year I dread the arrival of the bill as its always so completely random. Some years they want 500 quid, others they want 7 large... and there appears to be no rhyme nor reason as to how they work it out.. my salary doesnt change by THAT much.So i cant plan for it, then they hit me with a huge bill, i take out a loan to cover it and find myself in the shit. Happy days.

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Having never been to university myself either, these massive debts are a real mystery to me but I'm glad I never had the issue myself. I did start off in the 6th form but I struggled and dropped out after 6 months, bummed around for a while then enrolled on a course that sounded interesting which was engineering drawing at a local youth training centre. After a few ups and downs I got some lucky breaks with jobs and worked my way up doing day release at college in the process and now have a project management job I really enjoy with a half decent salary.I've worked my arse off on the way and still do and granted, though I missed out the whole social scene of uni, not having that financial millstone round my neck is a real relief. I feel for you guys who have been saddled with that.My family has never been the most well off and I've always been taught to live within my means (some would say I'm tight! :P ). Seems to me a lot of kids go into this today thinking they can still have whatever they want, whenever and then it comes round to bite them on the arse later on. :? I've never thought going to uni was the be all and end all - you can do it other ways if you try but I know a lot of my friend's parents at the time pushed their kids into it because it was "the done thing".

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I've never thought going to uni was the be all and end all - you can do it other ways if you try but I know a lot of my friend's parents at the time pushed their kids into it because it was "the done thing".

That's 100% right! I myself wasn't pushed into it though, I just couldn't be bothered having a job for a bit and it seemed like a nice way around it (it wasn't), but I knew some people who had to go because their folks gave them grief.I would say on reflection that higher education doesn't suit everyone, so I'm not sure why the government are so determined to get people to take it on. If I could go back I'd have gone straight into work from school - I reckon in my case experience would be a lot more valued than qualifications and I think I'd be doing a bit better for myself now had I done that.Still, when I'm driving to work in the Galant wearing a suit I can pretend that I'm doing really well for myself, as I head towards my grief hole to partake in dross.
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I have a couple of mates who managed to get in to 30k and 35k debts after 3 year uni courses. Most of that was done in the 1st year! seemingly the universitys seem to encorage them to spend as much money as possible. I am down 12k which was just the student loan and that just covered accomodation (only just!). Cars, food, beer, and other stuff was my own money that i earnt from working in part time jobs in the summer. I probably would be in less debt it i hadn't decided having 2 cars on the road was a good idea :lol:

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I'll tell you what it is, I am proper glad I am not at university age now. I finished uni in 1999 with about £5k worth of debts, then i got a graduate loan of another £3k which I spent mainly on sweets and pop and cars from the scrapyard. Anyway it took me what seemed like fuggin years to pay even that poxy amount off. well it was years in fact, I think I finally cleared it all up in about 2003, what a pain in the ass. Now its normal to finish your degree with 3 times the debt I had, the interest rate on student loans is virtually indistinguishable from an ordinary bank loan, houses cost 6 times your salary instad of 3-4 times... how you're supposed to balance all that lot and get on with a normal life I dont know. Anyway bring on the credit crunch I say, it'll do us the world of good in the meduim-long term.

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From leaving school it took me six years to finally get my degree in Mech Eng but two of those years were spent working for the firm that was sponsoring me. I was fotunate that my parents helped me out with accomodation costs (but not food, commuting 40 miles each way to uni etc) but the years of work and during each summer two were probably the reason I came out of it without any signifcant debt. That and I just missed the tuition fees I think. I couldn't have got my first job (with the sponsoring firm) or the second when I was made redundant 18 months later (with no severance at all) without my relevant degree. But then redundancy came along again 18 months later (ooh! No severance again!) and couldn't find any other work. So after a while I became self emplyed in sort of engineering field and use little that I learnt in my degree. In fact my years of making plastic kits probaly helped more.I could have gone straight in to what I do now (if I'd known such a job existed) from school but it would have taken longer to learn and I don't regret the social side of Uni at all. I think I certainly grew as a person while away from home, dealing with quite a bit of crap at times.

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I went to Uni because i was too lazy to get a job. Dossed around for 4 years got a mickey mouse degree in something that has no reference in any workplace and went into the same job i could have had before Uni, but with debts to pay. However i had an ace time by all accounts and dont regret it at all. I have some mates that did proper degrees in subjects that train you for something and they did well. My mate who did telecommunications is now a telecoms engineer earning 50k+, my mate who did forensic science went on to get a doctorate and now works for a chemical company in America earning lots of $ (i know its worth pennies now but that cant be helped).With the economic downtrun and less job available you will soon see the government encouraging people to go into education. One more person at Uni is 1 less person on the dole queue and helps the stats. I dont doubt we will see incentives offering cheaper loans etc.

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I can honestly say I would be more healthy, wealthy and wise if I'd left school at 11.

 

I have a degree from the UBS and I have seriously considered replacing it on my CV with a prison sentence. I was driving taxis all the time I was at college and most times I leave the Mickey Mouse degree off and account for the time with taxi driving.

 

The drive to send everybody with a glimmer of intelligence to university is flawed on several counts. It devalues a university qualification, there simply aren't enough graduate jobs to go around (or indeed enough universities, which is why they have had to make pretend ones) and it leaves nobody to do the work that actually needs done.

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I didn't bother with University either and I'm generally glad I didn't. OK so the social side might be quite good what with getting to be constantly pissed and bang hot student chicks but the debt and the actual studying didn't appeal.So after doing A levels I went and got what I thought would be a career - as a trainee Quantity Surveyor. Well that bored the arse off me and having an interest in cars led me to working for a local car rental company / Renault Autopoint. And the rest as they say is history. I'm just glad I didn't have the debt from being a student and have been able to use what 'spare' money I have to spend on getting my mortgage down / going on holiday / rusting old heaps of Frog tin.

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... and bang hot student chicks

O RLY. As I recall the 'hot chicks' soon transmogrified into hideous munters, usually about the same time that the 10 pints of snakebite and cheap cannabis wore off. Nothing like trying to escape some snaoring grim troll, only to find that in the hurry to flee the abhorrent self-inflicted shame you've just sneaked out of your own house...
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only to find that in the hurry to flee the abhorrent self-inflicted shame you've just sneaked out of your own house...

LOLHmmm, well yes we've all made a few mistakes I suppose and found that the lovely student totty turned slowly but surely into a Hippacroccapig as you regained consciousness. I can be fairly certain you don't need University for that. Just alcohol.
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I'm another one who's made little or no use of my degree. Sure, when I joined the company I currently work for I started on £2K more than the school leavers, but they've more or less caught me up after six years. I don't regret doing it though - the course was interesting and there was no way I would have been mature enough to enter the adult world at age 18 (living at home was not an option for me as my parents had buggered off to France by then), and I was "only" around eight grand in debt when I finished (and most of that was due to cars - I had eight by the end of my final year). Also, to be fair, I did start the course intending it to be vocational - it took me about six weeks to realise that lawyers are almost invariably complete tossers and that if I had to spend the rest of my life working with twats like the people on my course I would almost certainly end up topping myself. I still enjoyed those four years though, and they gave me the chance to grow up a bit before I was forced to start pretending to be an adult and working for a living.

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just about everyone i know in radio

I didn't know you were in radio. *Warning! Anorak moment approaching!*I do some Community RSL stuff from time to time.Although I realise you may well regard us as either tossers who devalue your job by doing it (badly) for nothing, weirdo wannabes with too much time on their hands or the lucky bastids who can do pretty much whatever they want on air without the suits hauling you over the coals.(Some or possibly all of the above are true)I (assuming I could) would never try and make a living from it, you are a brave man. Hope you dont get rebranded (Heart etc.) anytime soon!What have you told your insurance company you do?!(second thoughts, dont answer that!)
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O RLY. As I recall the 'hot chicks' soon transmogrified into hideous munters, usually about the same time that the 10 pints of snakebite and cheap cannabis wore off. Nothing like trying to escape some snaoring grim troll, only to find that in the hurry to flee the abhorrent self-inflicted shame you've just sneaked out of your own house...

A mate of mine has an amusing term for young ladies such as the ones you describe above - "stealth moose". It refers to a lady who at first (usually drunken) glance and from a distance gives off the illusion of being perfectly presentable (so you'd probably wander over and try to chat her up if you saw her in a bar) but if one gets too up close and personal with her it soon becomes apparent that she's actually a bit of a munter. I came across a few myself during my time at uni, although I wasn't aware of the term "stealth moose" at the time.
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This talk of Uni giving life skills is certainly true. Reminds me of a conversation I had with an 18yr old lad fresh outta A-levels under my instruction in my previous job:Him: You know it's half term next week.Me: So?Him: Well, do I have to come into work?Me: ....what? Err, yes.Him: Oh.Him: (*noise of cogs going round in small brain*)Him: Will I still get paid?Me: .....yeeeeeeeeeeess.....Him: Oh, that's alright then.QED.

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