Planning your finances

During enrolment, we’ll ask you how you’re paying your tuition fees. It’s important to sort your fees payments as soon as possible and we’ve made it even easier to spread any payments across the year.

Student Finance

If you’re paying for your fees with a student loan, make sure that you have sorted your student finance arrangements and let us know during your enrolment. Hopefully by now your application for a tuition fee loan and maintenance loan (if you even are applying for these) will be long gone. But you can still apply now or contact Student Finance England to let them know of anything that might have changed.

You can even try to work out just how much you will receive from Student Finance England if you are taking out a maintenance loan. If you know how much your student loan will be, you know how much you have to spend! Check out the student finance calculator online.

If you’re an undergraduate student, your tuition fees will be paid directly to BCU in three instalments. However, if you’re a postgraduate student your fees will be paid to you in three instalments, so you’ll need to ensure this is paid to BCU as soon as you receive it.

Self-funded

If you’re self-funded, we’ll send you an invoice to your BCU email address. Once you’ve received this, you can either pay your fees straight away online or set up an instalment plan to spread the cost across the year using the BCU student invoice payment portal.

Log in to the invoice payment portal

You’ll have to set up a card payment plan for your invoice and the payments will be made automatically on the due date.

International students

International students are required to pay a £3,000 deposit as a secure online payment.

We can only accept course fees in Pounds Sterling and we do not accept cash payments. There are a number of payment methods for paying your course fees, which you can see on our International section.

Options for international fees

Sponsorship

If your fees are being paid by a sponsor, you’ll need to provide a letter from your approved sponsor during enrolment. Your sponsor letter must:

• Be on the sponsor’s official letterhead
• Clearly state the full student name·Include yourstudent number
• Include the sponsored amount or the proportionof the feessponsored
• Provide the academic years for sponsorship(clearly statedif multiple years)
• Provide details of the course or programme
• Provide full details of where the invoice should be sent, including Sponsor contact name, details, postal address and e-mail address
• Be signed by the person authorising the sponsorship
• Provideany reference number or purchase order for the organisation sponsoring
• Meet the requirements of theapprenticeship contract

Budgeting

Have you ever paid rent before? Ever done the weekly food shop? How much does a four-pack of Heinz baked beans cost?

Budgeting is huge, before, during and even after university. Getting a budget in place early and forecasting your spending will make your time much easier, so you’re not scraping by at the end of each month.

We’ve even put together a helpful little budgeting calculator so that you don’t need to create one yourself.

As a BCU student you can also sign up to the online financial support service Blackbullion for free using your BCU email address.

Sign up to Blacbullion