It took 10 years, three ex's, two countries, and living with my mother for a bit, but I finally paid it all off.
Ask me how I feel. The guy who took my final payment on the phone was happier than I was
this post was submitted on 13 Mar 2025
54 points (96.6% liked)
Casual UK
2596 readers
68 users here now
Casual UK
A casual place for banter and anything that doesn't fit in anywhere else.
Have chat and a natter. Talk about anything and everything that's not political!
Keep it casual.
Rules
- No politics.
- Be friendly.
- Be kind & civil.
- Follow Feddit.uk site rules.
Other communities:
Here:
Elsewhere:
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Made my final payment last year, felt so good!
Congrats - has it been a real game changer, or do you just buy fancier groceries now or something haha
It's certainly been helpful, my wife lost her job last year and we've also put our youngest kid into nursery, so they're costs we're able to afford that we might not have been able to do last year.
I'm childless at the moment, but kids are definitely something I think about paymentwise
I'm close to paying mine off so I will weigh in here.
Probably best to avoid "lifestyle creep", this is money you haven't had before now and it should probably be put straight into some investment, a stocks and shares ISA for example, or to overpay the mortgage (or save for deposit, so I guess that's LISA these days). I'm assuming since you're actually able to pay it off then you must be on decent money and you won't "need" the extra couple hundred quid a month.
Other thing to realise is that the 9% over whatever amount you've been paying back was after tax. So I think there's some decent argument to be made that you're leaving money on the table if you don't instead redirect a larger portion of your gross salary into your pension via salary sacrifice. Then instead of paying the tax man you instead significantly increase the contributions to your private pension.
I'm guessing the UK financial advice sub (or I guess "com" if there's one here on Lemmy, sorry, I'm new here) would be a good place to ask.
Wow, good tips thank you. I guess I'll start paying more into my pension. My pension is currently tied to my workplace, and I've always been wary of paying into it more just in case I can't take it with me if I work elsewhere.
Is that the case? Can I take my company pension with me? Or that just stays in the company and I can't take it with me when I work somewhere else
Most people have standard defined contribution pensions now. You can probably log into some pension companies site and see how much you have in there?
If that's the case, then it's your money (locked away u til retirement) that you can move to any pension provider you like.
You can ask your company to pay some of your salary into there - therefore you don't get taxed on that bit of new salary (they might also match your contribution if you are lucky)
You can also just open a pension with another provider and pay money in. You will (eventually) get a bonis 20/40% tax refund paid in there too.
To be honest I'm no expert on the possibilities so I'm not going to be able to answer that other than to maybe reach out to your HR people and ask for some details on what your options are. Or ask on r/UKPersonalFinance.
thesalarycalculator.co.uk is a good site if you wanna compare how different scenarios affect your take home pay. E.g. put your salary in with student loan ticked for plan 1 and your pension contributions at their current level, then note the take home pay per month. Then do the same but with student loan not ticked, to see how much that increases your take home. Then experiment with upping the pension contributions until the take home pay matches the value you were getting before you took the student loan off. That'll give you an idea of how much you can increase your pension contributions without noticing a difference in your monthly pay. Then head over to one of the various pension calculator sites (Aviva is decent and simple) and see how much bigger your pension pot could end up if you do that. Will probably be quite substantial!