Why I was lucky to be a student

A cool summer breeze left a refreshing chill in the air that evening in Bath. The bars had emptied and stacks of cardboard boxes lay neatly piled up outside the shop-fronts along the high street.

Out from the darkness, two men approached.

“Hand over your wallet”

Growing up in a less affluent part of London, I was generally very good at avoiding these situations. Typically I walked slowly, blended in with my surroundings and tried not appear too visible. I avoided catching night buses and if I did, I never sat upstairs or at the back. If the worst happened, I knew not to make eye contact and comply straight away, making myself as unthreatening as possible. Then, I prayed like mad that I didn’t get beaten or stabbed.

However, that evening I had a one problem – I was really drunk.

My Russian friend Gleb had brought some of the good stuff back home over the Easter break. It’s fair to say I wasn’t completely aware of what was going on at the time. I started singing Frank Sinatra’s New York, New York with a phoney Russian accent. This was Gleb fault because he made me sing it with him an hour earlier.

The next minute I knew, there was a fist flying towards me. Somehow I stumbled and the punch missed me completely. The guy had thrown all his weight into the punch, so he ended up falling forward and tripping up on my elevated low leg.

I turned around and pushed him into the middle of the street.

Then seconds later, he got hit by a taxi.

Despite what you might think, this was the single most important event that ever happened to me as a student.

University was great, but it wasn’t easy.

In the house I lived, we couldn’t afford the heating bill, so we just turned off the boiler. This meant taking showers in the University gym and wearing a few extra layers in winter. When it got too cold, I found I could warm up my hands with the light bulb in my room.

Unfortunately, rising damp in the house coupled with turning off the heating meant by spring, the walls and ceilings were covered in mould.

I was about to be evicted because I hadn’t paid rent for three months and my landlady wanted to report me to the University. She backed off a bit after I threatened to report the mould issue to the council. Nevertheless, she was losing patience – we were caught subletting a room to an illegal immigrant to make-up the shortfall in cash.

To make matters worse, I had just been fired from my last student job, distributing leaflets for windows company. The man who owned the business underpaid me and claimed he didn’t have the cash on him. So I took some shortcuts to the extent that one day he caught me recycling the leaflets in a supermarket car park.

However, I was lucky to be a student. Up until that point I had scraped through and could just about afford it as a young man from a very normal middle class family.

In the future, students from a similar background to me will probably have no chance. University will just be too expensive.

To put this in perspective, today’s students have to pay nine to ten times more in university fees than I did and this is set to rise. The generation before me, which includes my mother, didn’t pay a penny, plus they received grants.

Last year alone, student loans rose 17 percent in the UK, owing to these rising fees. According the Institute of Fiscal Studies, 70 percent of students that graduated last year will never pay off their loans. They will make repayments for the next 30 years and then their unpaid loans will be written off.

From experience, paying off a student loan is a bit like paying 5 percent more on your income tax. If you have wealthy parents, or parents that put a little money away each month, then you’re fine. But most people aren’t that lucky. The excessive amounts of debt they now have to incur are robbing them of the opportunities I had after university.

Surely we should reward the ambitious – those that want more in life and those that will be future wealth creators for generations to come. Unfortunately, not enough is being done today by politicians, despite many promises being made. I guess life just isn’t fair.

However, I’m not taking any chances with my children’s future. I’m putting a little aside each month for this reason because I know that in the long-run it has worked for me in the past. I’ve done it before for different reasons. It started when I was a student on a one-year work placement for discretionary manager BestInvest. In my next post I will share with you these experiences and how they helped me pay off my student loan and get on the housing ladder.

Returning to my story, my attacker was unharmed – well almost. He got up and ran away with a limp along with his accomplice, while being pursued by an irate overweight cab driver. I reported it to the police and they wrote up a report. They knew instantly who they were and were subsequently arrested.

They were under 18 years old so they couldn’t go to prison. However, in court they were ordered to pay me £3,000 in compensation. It turned out to be the most profitable evening in my student life. I paid off my land lady and cleared my overdraft. And, I had enough money to get me through to the end of the year and eventually finish my degree.

I was often at the right place at the time to get lucky and make it through university with a decent degree. However, I realise now that I will have to create some luck for my kids if I want them to succeed too. If you are in the same position as me, I suggest you do this as well.