Owen Rascovitch

I think it's the entire amount, isn't it?

So like if you hit, as soon as you hit that band, then that extra tax is applied to everything.

And that's why when you go to an employer and you have like a tax file declaration number, a TFN declaration, there's a box that says fee help.

And you need to tick that if you have been to university and you've used fee help.

Not everyone has used fee help.

There's some people who have.

There's a few different loan schemes and a few different boxes.

So it's just worth checking with your HR and ticking the right box because if you don't tick it and the employer isn't taking extra tax out, you're going to have a bit of a tax bill when you get to the end of financial year.

So it is a lot easier if it's taken out on a monthly, fortnightly basis.

I had a friend recently who had to – got the bill at tax time because she didn't know the employer wasn't taking out her tax.

Right.

Okay, yeah, we'll definitely double check that.

The question that I always get is should I pay it back?

And that's like what they're asking is should I take money from my own pocket and pay off my student debt?

yeah so once you've graduated uni aggressively trying to pay down your student loan I think in Australia it's not really worth it I mean if you've got the spare 40k then go ahead but it is probably the best debt you're ever gonna get in terms of it's only going up it's indexed every year and

And I think in 2018 it was 1.9%.

So in terms of... So if you compare that to a mortgage, which is probably the cheapest form outside of student debt, that's still like in 2019 it's like 4%.

Yeah.

And your HECS debt is probably a lot smaller than your mortgage.

It might be 30 grand or something like that.