About this site
You're thirtyish and you want to know who's telling you this.
One person wrote this, and it isn't a company
No team, no office, no funding, no app coming later.
I built Thirtyish because every student loan calculator I could find gives you a number and tells you nothing. You put in a salary, it returns a figure, and you leave knowing exactly as much about your own situation as when you arrived.
I taught maths for years, then spent three decades designing large systems for a living. Neither of those makes me a financial adviser, and I'm not one. What they do make me is someone who can read the actual regulations, check the arithmetic against them, and then explain the result to a person rather than to a spreadsheet.
There's no name on this page, and that's deliberate
Anonymity, not a fake persona. Everything on the site is written by a real person; you just don't get their name.
I know how this reads. On a money site, the usual move is a photograph, a job title and a paragraph about my passion for financial wellbeing. Sites that do that rank slightly better, because Google explicitly tells its reviewers to look hard at who stands behind financial pages. I've chosen to take that hit.
Two reasons. I'd rather not attach my name permanently to a side project. And the alternative — inventing a plausible-sounding author with a stock photo — is worse than either honest option, because a trust asset built on someone who doesn't exist is a trust asset with a fuse in it.
So: no name, no photo, no LinkedIn, no social accounts. If that's disqualifying for you, that's a reasonable position and there are large, well-staffed sites covering the same ground.
What I'm trying to do here is narrower than it looks
Explain the thing properly, once, for people roughly 25 to 35 — and then get out of the way.
The audience is deliberate. Nobody worries about a student loan at 22, because the median graduate isn't earning enough to repay anything yet. The worry arrives later: the deductions are visible on every payslip, the balance is somehow still going up, and then a mortgage adviser asks about it and you realise you've never actually understood how the thing works.
That's the moment this site is written for. It isn't written for your parents, and it isn't written in the voice of a bank.
The numbers here come from legislation, not from other calculators
Every figure traces to GOV.UK, the underlying regulations, or the House of Commons Library — and the working is on the page.
I deliberately didn't source any figure from a competing calculator, however well it ranks. Copying a number inherits whatever error produced it, and it means I could never honestly claim to have checked anything.
Where I've had to assume something the law doesn't specify — future inflation, salary growth — the assumption is stated, adjustable, and listed on the assumptions and limitations page. Where I don't know something, the site says so rather than guessing.
What this site will never do
No sign-up, no email capture, no products, no recommendations.
There's nothing to join. The calculator runs entirely in your browser — your salary and your balance are never sent anywhere, because there's no "anywhere" to send them to. I don't want your email address.
The site carries advertising, and that's how it's paid for. I don't take commission for sending you to a lender, a broker or an investment platform, and there are no affiliate links anywhere on it. If that ever changes it will be said plainly on this page, not buried.
And I won't tell you what to do. Partly because it would be presumptuous when I don't know your situation, and mostly because the whole point is to give you enough to decide for yourself.
How to get hold of me
Email works. Nothing else exists.
I read everything. I can't reply to everyone, and I can't answer questions about your personal circumstances — but if a number on this site is wrong, tell me and I will fix it and say that I have.
If you'd rather write: Thirtyish, Suite 107, 80A Ruskin Ave, Welling DA16 3QQ.
I can't tell you what to do about your own loan. I don't know your situation, and this is information rather than advice.