The money is normally taken out automatically from your pay like withholding. This means that you don’t ever see that portion of money. In my case I lose $200 per fortnight to my HECS/HELP debt. This means that per year I knock off roughly $5.2k from my debt with the Australian Government. Funky.

The trick comes in is that this amount isn’t paid onto my loan until after I’ve done my tax. So all the money I’ve paid thus far this year doesn’t get counted and interest is charged including anything I’ve studied up until May the same year. Since semester 1 starts in March and “census” date is in April (the date at which course fees are paid) and semester two starts in July (next financial year), you get interest calculated on both semesters (plus in my case a summer semester, semester 3) not including the amount you have already had “withheld” over the same period of time.

So when it comes down to it, it is better to opt not to have your employer withhold your HECS/HELP debt, save the money in a high interest account somewhere and then a few months into the new financial year pay it as a part of your tax debt. Of course the problem with that is that you pay tax on the interest you accrue from the bank account however you’re at least earning money and not losing any money in the process.

The question of course becomes, who earns the interest on the withheld money? I’ll leave that as an exercise to the reader.

As a phone user I’d started as a Telstra “communic8″ user for my first phone. This worked out well as at the time Telstra had this ‘feature’ where you could link it to another phone that was on a plan (my dad’s) and it could give you a nominated amount of money a month ($10) and one months ‘access’ for this token amount. On top of this you were permitted something like three calls per day for around 3 minutes to that same number for free. Rather handy that you didn’t need credit to call home. Other useful things Telstra had (and might still have) is that your access to the network and credit expiry accrued each time you recharged up to about two years. I know this because I managed to get just that amount of access accrued on my Telstra phone before I switched.

All in all I was happy with Telstra as they have arguably the best coverage in Australia for mobile phones. They aren’t the cheapest mind you but all in all I was happy since most of the premium crap that required a plan didn’t interest me and my phone really didn’t support those features (an ancient Motorolla, a Nokia ‘potato phone’ 3315 and a Nokia 6310i that I think my nan has). It turns out with Joomla! I end up overseas periodically and the first time this happened (a trip to Thailand in 2005), it really hurt not having any phone connectivity.

So at this point I went to Telstra and asked them what their international roaming options where for prepaid. The answer was simple: upgrade to a plan. I happen to like being prepaid and interestingly for the fact that I’ve already given them the money (e.g. they’re already earning interest on it before I’ve used it in addition to being more expensive) I still don’t get service. I’m personally not the sort of person who likes borrowing money if I can avoid it, so that means anything credit related (e.g. credit card, mobile phone) gets avoided where possible. This turns out remarkably easy, prepaid telephone only gives you what you pay for and a VISA debit card gives you access to your own money. Interestingly, and perhaps this is why providers hate prepaid, it is possible to continue to ‘rollover’ your credit from period to period by renewing even if it is the smallest amount. This means that you never lose what you pay for where as regular plans are a pay for it if you use it and pay more if you use too much (Optus was half decent where they had a ‘rollover’ for a few months scheme, not sure if it still runs but it exemplifies the fact you by design pay for what you aren’t going to use as opposed to prepaid which is pay for what you use).

So I decided at that point to stop being a happy Telstra customer and switch. Vodafone offered on of the best deals with their cap plan (this is about a month before their major advertising promotion on it) and to be honest it was really attractive – however the cap plans didn’t have international roaming. So they had some nice phones and all was good cost wise for prepaid (which did have international roaming) however Vodafone’s coverage for Toowoomba is below substandard. Given that my mum lives a good 20 minutes drive out of town that would mean I probably wouldn’t get coverage there. Here is where Optus come in with second rate costing but a far more advanced phone network. Optus also offered international roaming on their prepaid and the rates were a bit more (roaming always is a rip off) however you have a cost to pay for these things. They offered good coverage over places I’m likely to go to so that was good. Optus being owned by Singtel also meant that Singapore was incredibly cheap, Asia was relatively cheap and everywhere else was expensive (relative to international roaming costs). It actually reminds me of when I came back from Malaysia that it was cheaper to roam on my prepaid Malaysian SIM card than to go back to Telstra (yes, it was cheaper for me to SMS from a phone roaming from Malaysia to Australian networks than it was for me on Australian to even the same carrier) – and this is back in 2004.

So I’ve been on Optus and travelled around the world roaming quite happily. It costs an arm and a leg however I’m happy with that and expect it. I thought about my last trip overseas which costed a fair amount of money, much more than I normally spend in a month (and this is over a week) and wonder where the wisdom in not giving me the ability to spend money is. I mean really, when I want to spend money with you make it easy! A while after I switched to Optus I got a new Nokia N80 (noticing a trend here) and I’ve had that for a while now and I’m quite happy with it, however as a slide phone the design annoys me no end. Last year I ended up getting an iPhone as well and instead of converting my existing phone across I decided to put it on its own SIM card and run it through the TurboCap. This means I have two phones to feed, one that rotates on a two month basis (the Nokia) and another that requires a refresh every month. Compared to being able to let my credit lay around for nearly two years unmolested by the carrier (amazingly Telstra is on top for once) having to renew every month or lose it sounds strikingly like a plan where you decide how much you pay each month instead of being fixed into a specific dollar amount by the carrier. But I digress yet again and now with iPhone OS 3.0 tethering for the iPhone (that I already had with my N80) is now available. Of course I need to get Optus to enable it on my account, but again we’re back to being provided with a service and well I’m on prepaid. Some how Optus manage to limit tethering to just plan providers and you have to pay a further $10 for the privilege of using your own data in a different way. So being on a prepaid phone I don’t have access to the service.

As this is my second phone I’m half tempted to switch to another carrier because I have that freedom. I keep my Nokia because a) I don’t care about it as much now (I originally bought it in Singapore in a rather rapid one hour transit – one end of the airport to the other with this shop in between and some local cash acquisition; got every where I needed to go) and b) since a I can happily take it overseas, leave my iPhone at home and not worry about losing it (which would hurt more losing my Nokia; if I lost my Nokia I’d be tempted to get an Android phone – or maybe a Palm Pre to replace my existing Zire 31 that still lives on for the last 5 years now).

It would just be nice to be treated like a real customer. One of my other prepaid gripes is that they don’t have bills that you can easily review to see how much it really costs you but such is life.

For those playing at home who aren’t familiar with HECS/HELP, heres a quick primer on how it works. Once upon a time university education in Australia was free, surprising but true. This was a long time ago, about the same time as the present set of politicians were getting educated. And then it progressed to be that students wouldn’t get free education but they would be given a loan interest free that would get paid back to the government based on their tax return. This effectively meant that above a certain point you got taxed at a higher rate and that went towards paying your debt. Nifty, not ideal but not entirely horrible. The Howard Government in part of its many University related reforms decided that they would charge interest on this loan, using CPI to index it. When this was introduced it didn’t sound too bad. CPI was relatively low, 2% to 3%, and the cash interest rate was comparatively high, 6% to 7+%. So it didn’t seem to bad.

Fast forward to now and we’ve hit an economic crisis. Inflation is now 5% and the cash interest rate is at 5.25%. Keep in mind that banks are at present loaning at around the 8% mark up to 9%. It would in fact be interesting to see if the CPI retained its position and the interest lowered even further making CPI higher than the cash lending rate, but that much is pure speculation. However why does this matter?

Well whilst the Student Guild’s are bleating in pleasure that the Labor government is going to give them back their cash cow so that they can spend it on useless things again. Now I have nothing against the employees of said Unions/Guilds, my sister is in fact one and the people who work at my uni refect are also awesome, they just don’t offer me anything valuable. Take for example a bottle of coke, that is 20 cents cheaper out of the vending machine up the hall a little bit from the refect than it is to purchase from the refect. The vending machine itself is 10 cents more expensive than driving down the road a little bit to the bakery and considerably more expensive than buying it from the local supermarket. Part of this I can understand, but when I was a member of the union forcibly and had to pay $40 per subject (comparatively not too bad) the fact that I then have to pay for food that isn’t competitive is a bit of a blow. Keeping in mind that at my university the Guild has manage to remove any external provider and is the sole provider of sustenance on campus controlling the two coffee shops (one under the library and another near the book shop), having a club facility (coffee, alcohol at night, food during the day) and the main refect – after all of this it is still more expensive. Vending machines are a bit more complicated but seem to strangely compete with the Guild which leads me to wonder who exactly controls them. But I digress, whilst they bleat about wanting money and how they won’t squander it (some fees were as high as $600), the Government is also talking about the ability to defer this extra fee to HECS/HELP as well and nobody seems to care that the interest rate on said loan is in fact increasing.

It proves perhaps most to me about how pointless and useless the union system is that they make so much noise about getting money from the universities and not about ensuring the good of their potential members. My Guild didn’t act in my behalf and provided no tangible service which meant that I had no issues leaving them. Turned out that the university ended up propping them up anyway, so they didn’t lose much but at the end of the day they were next to useless. What I found most interesting was that when voluntary student unionism was being introduced they complained that the sports fields would be overgrown and unrulely. Funnily enough I felt that the university was an academic location and not a sporting facility so if the grass grew a little too long on a sports field then so be it. And in this single moment it encapsulates all that was wrong about the Guild.

I keep going off track here, but my problem is of course the fact that the Student Unions don’t do a lot to support their students and expect so much of them. I’ve heard nothing about the fact that CPI has doubled and thus the loan’s interest rate has also increased.

Perhaps nobody has realised what is happening yet because they haven’t looked at their tax yet or seen the increase in their interest. Perhaps next year they will see it and then there will be some noise, though I doubt. It’d be nice to at least go back to the last iteration where the government sponsored the education of its people and they had to slowly pay it back with no interest incurred. Perhaps I’m complaining about nothing, but wouldn’t you be worried if the loan you signed up for had doubled its rate and the prospect of getting a job was drastically reduced?