Angry Rant about Student Finance

I imagine there are other people like me. I've been brought up to live within my means, to buy when I can afford, to abhor the 'buy now, pay later' culture. I abhor my student debts and I've lived like a pauper for the last three years so that I'll be able to pay it off as soon as I possibly can. I HATE the fact that it hangs over me. And I don't see why I should pay a penny in interest, when the costs are already ridiculously large at the beginning.

I'm a lucky one. I feel sorry for people born three years after me, who will face the £9000 debts a year, just in terms of tuition fees. Who won't have a choice but to have the debts with them until they're about 50 or however long it takes for the debts to be written off.

And so you can probably understand why this absolutely sickens me: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-14836202.

I can image that other people share my mentality. Who'll decide, when faced with £9000 of debt each year, to go to local unis to reduce their debts and who'll save as much as they possibly can during that time (with part time jobs and things) to try get rid of the debts as fast as possible. Not because they'll eventually become "high" earners. But because they can't stand the fact of living in debt all their lives.

And to celebrate such honest, hard-working people, the government wants to introduce penalties for paying off debts early. It won't apply to me, of course, and once again I can only feel so thankful that I was born in 1989 and not a few years later. But my heart goes out to anyone in later generations who has a similar mindset to me. It really does.

Hopefully such an evil scheme won't go through... The think tank says it won't be cost-effective, so hopefully the government will reconsider. After all, it's all about money.

I've always been in favour of a fair student "tax", which works on a sliding scale depending on your income. Tax sounds so much better than debt. Effectively, the government debt scheme is trying to BE a tax. So I don't get why they didn't just introduce one in the first place. It must be numbers. They think they can get more out of people by introducing a debt that builds interest. Horrible.

Well, angry rant over.

Goodreads

September. *blows out the dust again* Time for a new blogging resolution to blog a bit more regularly. I've had quite a lot of ideas for blogs recently, but haven't actually got around to writing them. It's a bit frustrating...unless you blog it right when the mood hits you, you sort of lose enthusiasm with it (and 2am is an annoying time to turn the computer on). Maybe that's why people like Twitter--a handful of characters isn't very time consuming...

Anyway, you've probably heard of this blog topic before: Goodreads, a place to record the books you read and what you thought of them. I was a little unsure what to make of it when I joined up, but since then I've added a few books and I actually quite like it. It's nice to make a record of the books because with my bad memory, it's always quite hard to remember what I've read...

For some reason, there's also something satisfying in totting up the books into a nice, ever-growing statistic. We like stats, as humans, don't we? Even though most of them are nonsense (99% of statistics are made up on the spot...geddit?). My Goodreads only lists about 80 books, but that's because I can't be bothered to wrack my brains *too* hard to recall everything I've ever read. Still, I'm trying to start a habit of adding every NEW book I read, and the number's creeping up now.

The website also gives you updates on the authors you've read before, whenever they publish something new. Like a while back, I found out through it that Mary Hoffman has a new book out. Not the Stravaganza series that I like but something standalone. Whenever I have a spare moment to read something of my own choice (doesn't happen very often!), I'll get around to reading it.

You can have friends on Goodreads and compare your reading tastes, which is quite interesting, too. More fun stats. Unfortunately I only have two friends, so if you're reading this and aren't a complete stranger, feel free to add me... my profile is here.