Student debt repayments drop to 100 baht a month

The Student Loan Fund (SLF) is to introduce a more lenient loan repayment scheme — which will go as low as 100 baht per month — after defaults hit 45%, or 2.2 million bad debts, according to SLF manager Chainarong Katchapanan.

Recently, accumulated loan defaults hit 78 billion baht, said Mr Chainarong.

“If any debtors have financial issues, they can apply for a smaller deduction from their salaries via our application. The lowest tier is now just 100 baht a month,” he said.

Just as with tax payments, student load repayments are automatically taken from workers’ salaries to ensure payment, leaving many short of money to pay other bills. However, not all companies have adopted the automated system and there can be economic pressure on both employee and employer to not make the payments manually.

As of now, about 1.73 million in debt to the SLF are employed by…