the Student Loans Company

The Student Loans Company (SLC) is a UK public sector organisation established to provide financial services, in terms of loans and grants, to over one million students annually, in colleges and universities across the four education systems of England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales.

Our other key responsibility is the administration of the collection of repayments, from over two m

illion customers no longer in higher education.

FOR MORE DEATAILSSEE: www.slc.co.uk

DISPOSSIBLE MONEY

The Bank of England has cut interest rates to 3% - but credit card companies are unlikely to follow the lead and cut their interest rates. There has always been a massive discrepancy between the Bank of England base rate and the rate credit card providers charge, but now, accoring to Moneyfacts, consumers are paying an average of of more than 5 times the base rate.

This is a huge figure - if you’re a student and you’re looking at how expensive credit cards are, or anyone else for that matter. to pay an average of just under 17% equates to potentially huge interest charges on outstanding balances. If you have £1000 outstanding and you don’t pay any of it off for a year (you have to always pay off a minimum but it’s so small that it doesn’t dent the overall balance) then you’re going to get hit with around £170 worth of interest charges.

So why don’t credit card companies cut their rates - well, in a nutshell, they don’t have to! If they have enough customers and the market is all fairly even, then they’re happy charging what they do. According to sources “lenders only cut rates to attract customers”. It needs some kind of price war, or one of the credit card companies to really want to get a bigger share of the market to see things change.

There are a companies though where the APR is going to decrease. Co-op has a credit card that is linked to the base rate apparently, and their customers will benefit from this.

Another explanation for why credit card providers won’t cut their rates is offered by Barclays - who say that the primary factor in their pricing is risk, not the cost of money, so the cut will not have an immediate effect.

I don’t know about you - but charging an interest rate more than 5 times the base rate seems to be suggesting there is a whole lot of risk!!

To view details of a few credit card providers and the APR they are charging visit the credit card

First paid salary

While there is no first pay stub for the first work-for-pay exchange, the first salaried work would have required a human society advanced enough to have a barter system to allow work to be exchanged for goods or other work. More significantly, it presupposes the existence of organized employers --perhaps a government or a religious body--that would facilitate work-for-hire exchanges on a regular enough basis to constitute salaried work. From this, most infer that the first salary would have been paid in a village or city during the Neolithic Revolution, sometime between 10,000 BC and 6,000 BC.

• By the time of the Hebrew Book of Ezra (550 BC to 450 BC), accepting salt from a person was synonymous with drawing sustenance, taking pay, or being in that person's service. At that time salt production was strictly controlled by the monarchy or ruling elite. Depending on the translation of Ezra 4:14, the servants of King Artaxerxes I of Persia explain their loyalty variously as "because we are salted with the salt of the palace" or "because we have maintenance from the king" or "because we are responsible to the king."

• The Roman word salarium

Similarly, the Roman word salarium linked employment, salt and soldiers, but the exact link is unclear. The least common theory is that the word soldier itself comes from the Latin sal dare (to give salt). Alternatively, the Roman historian Pliny the Elder stated as an aside in his Natural History's discussion of sea water, that "[I]n Rome. . .the soldier's pay was originally salt and the word salary derives from it. . ." Plinius Naturalis Historia XXXI. Others note that soldier more likely derives from the gold solidus, with which soldiers were known to have been paid, and maintain instead that the salarium was either an allowance for the purchase of salt or the price of having soldiers conquer salt supplies and guard the Salt Roads (Via Salarium) that led to Rome.

• Payment in the Roman empire and medieval and pre-industrial Europe

Regardless of the exact connection, the salarium paid to Roman soldiers has defined a form of work-for-hire ever since in the Western world, and gave rise to such expressions as "being worth one's salt."

Yet within the Roman Empire or (later) medieval and pre-industrial Europe and its merchantile colonies, salaried employment appears to have been relatively rare and mostly limited to government service. More commonly, servitude either received no pay, as with slavery, serfdom, and indentured servitude, or received only fraction of what was produced, as with sharecropping. Other common alternative models of work included self- or co-operative employment, as with artisan guilds, or communal work and ownership, as with medieval universities and monasteries.

Passive income

Passive income is a rent received on a regular basis, with little effort required to maintain it. It is advocated by some authors, especially by Robert Kiyosaki.

Some examples of passive income are:

* Rental from property;
* Royalties from publishing a book or from a patent;
* Earnings from internet advertisement on your websites;
* Earnings from a business that does not require direct involvement from the owner or merchant;
* Dividend and interest income from owning securities, such as stocks and bonds, are usually referred to as portfolio income, which can be considered a form of passive income;
* Pensions.

Passive income is usually taxable. The American Internal Revenue Service defines passive income as one "generated by activity in which taxpayer did not materially participate". [1] Other financial and govenment institutions also recognize it as an income obtained as a result of capital growth or in relation to negative gearing.

Full and Haig-Simmons income

Full income refers to the accumulation of both, monetary and non-monetary consumption ability of any given entity, such a person or household. According to the what economist Nicholas Barr describes as the "classical definition of income:" the 1938 Haig-Simmons definition, "income may be defined as the... sum of (1) the market value of rights excerised in consumption and (2) the change in the value of the store of property rights..." Since the consumption potential of non-monetary goods, such as leisure, cannot be measured, monteray income may be thought of as a proxy for full income. As such, however, it is criticized for being unreliable, i.e. failing to accurately reflect affluence and that is consumption opportunities of any given agent. It omits the utility a person may derive from non-montary income and, on a macroeconomic level, fails to accurately chart social welfare. According Barr, "in practice money income as a proportion of total income varies widely and unsystematically. Non-observability of full-income prevent a complete characterization of the individual opportunity set, forcing us to use the unreliable yardstick of money income." On the macro-economic level, national per-capita income, increases with the consumption of activities that produce harm and omits many variables of societal health.

Poverty threshold

The poverty threshold, or poverty line, is the minimum level of income deemed necessary to achieve an adequate standard of living in a given country. In practice, like the definition of poverty, the official or common understanding of the poverty line is significantly higher in developed countries than in developing countries.

Almost all societies have some citizens living in poverty. The poverty threshold is useful as an economic tool with which to measure such people and consider socioeconomic reforms such as welfare and unemployment insurance to reduce poverty.

Determining the poverty line is usually done by finding the total cost of all the essential resources that an average human adult consumes in one year. This approach is needs-based in that an assessment is made of the minimum expenditure needed to maintain a tolerable life. This was the original basis of the poverty line in the United States, whose poverty threshold has since been raised due to inflation. In developing countries, the most expensive of these resources is typically the rent required to live in an apartment. Economists thus pay particular attention to the real estate market and housing prices because of their strong influence on the poverty threshold.

Individual factors are often used to account for various circumstances, such as whether one is a parent, elderly, a child, married, etc. The poverty threshold is adjusted each year. In 2007, in the United States of America, the poverty threshold for a single person under 65 was US$10,787; the threshold for a family group of four, including two children, was US$21,027.

Meaning within U.S. accountancy

In U.S. business and financial accounting, the term 'income' is also synonymous with revenue; however, many people use it as shorthand for net income, which is the amount of money that a company earns after covering all of its costs.

Net income is also called 'net profit'. It is calculated as follows:

1. The gross income or gross revenue is tabulated.
2. Where applicable, the cost of goods sold or cost of operations figure is subtracted from the gross income to yield the gross profit.
3. All expenses other the COGS or COO are subsequently subtracted from the gross profit to yield the net profit or net income - or, if a negative number, the net loss (usually written in parentheses). More commonly, this is called "Net Income (or Loss) Before Taxes".
4. Taxes are then subtracted from the pre-tax net income to give a final net income or net profit (or net loss) figure.

Net income or net profit which is not expended to shareholders in the form of dividends becomes part of retained earnings.

All public companies are required to provide financial statements on a quarterly basis, and the income statement of income is one of the most important of these. Some companies also provide a more rosy financial report of their income, with pro forma reporting, or, EBITDA reporting. Pro forma income is an estimate of how much the company would have earned without including the negative effect of exceptional "one-time events", supposedly in order to show investors how much money the company would have made under normal circumstances if these exceptional, one-time events had not occurred. Critics charge that, in most cases, the "one-time events" are normal business events, such as an acquisition of another company or a write off of a cancelled project or division, and that pro forma reporting is an attempt to mislead investors by painting a rosy financial picture. Besides that, when discussing results with analysts and shareholders, CEOs and CFOs have a tendency to do even more "hypothetical accounting". EBITDA stands for "earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortisation", and is also criticised for being an attempt to mislead investors. Warren Buffett has criticised EBITDA reporting, famously asking, "Does management think the tooth fairy pays for capital expenditures?"

It is common for some other companies, such as real estate investment trusts, to present reports using a standard called FFO, or "Funds From Operations". Like EBITDA reporting, FFO ignores depreciation and amortization. This is widely accepted in the industry, as real estate values tend to increase rather than decrease over time, and many data sites report earnings per share data using FFO.

Meaning in economics and use in economic theory

In economics, factor income is the flow (that is, measured per unit of time) of revenue accruing to a person or nation from labor services and from ownership of land and capital.

In consumer theory 'income' is another name for the "budget constraint," an amount Y to be spent on different goods x and y in quantities x and y at prices Px and Py. The basic equation for this is

Y = Px • x + Py • y.

This equation implies two things. First buying one more unit of good x implies buying Px/Py less units of good y. So, Px/Py is the relative price of a unit of x as to the number of units given up in y. Second, if the price of x falls for a fixed Y, then its relative price falls. The usual hypothesis is that the quantity demanded of x would increase at the lower price, the law of demand. The generalization to more than two goods consists of modelling y as a composite good.

The theoretical generalization to more than one period is a multi-period wealth and income constraint. For example the same person can gain more productive skills or acquire more productive income-earning assets to earn a higher income. In the multiperiod case, something might also happen to the economy beyond the control of the individual to reduce (or increase) the flow of income. Changing measured income and its relation to consumption over time might be modeled accordingly, such as in the permanent income hypothesis.

Meaning for U.S. Income Tax Purposes

For the average citizen in many countries, the term “income” is most relevant for its role in determining how much income tax a person must pay. In the United States, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is the executive agency in charge of collecting income taxes. The IRS implements and enforces the Internal Revenue Code (IRC), a set of laws passed by Congress.

For the purpose of taxing income under the IRC, the IRS relies on the definition of income provided in a 1955 U.S. Supreme Court case called Commissioner v. Glenshaw Glass Co., 348 U.S. 426 (1955). According to this case, taxpayers have “income” when they experience "instances of undeniable accessions to wealth, clearly realized, and over which the taxpayers have complete dominion." This means that a taxpayer has income for income tax purposes when he receives something of value (including money, property, securities, or anything else), the transfer is complete, and the taxpayer can control the thing of value.

This definition is helpful for a taxpayer trying to decide what constitutes income. However, there is another way of looking at income for income tax purposes. “Income” is a concept Congress has seized upon for allocating how much tax each member of society will pay. The system seeks to tax individuals in a way that is fair, or at least in a way that appears to be fair. By claiming to assign tax burdens according to how much “income” a person has, the system purports to tax all taxpayers evenly.

Income tax

An income tax is a tax levied on the financial income of persons, corporations, or other legal entities. Various income tax systems exist, with varying degrees of tax incidence. Income taxation can be progressive, proportional, or regressive. When the tax is levied on the income of companies, it is often called a corporate tax, corporate income tax, or profit tax. Individual income taxes often tax the total income of the individual (with some deductions permitted), while corporate income taxes often tax net income (the difference between gross receipts, expenses, and additional write-offs).

Income inequality

Income inequality refers to the extent to which income is distributed in an uneven manner. Within a society can be measured by various methods, including the Lorenz curve and the Gini coefficient. Economists generally agree that certain amounts of inequality are necessary and desirable but that excessive inequality leads to efficiency problems and social injustice.

National income, measured by statistics such as the Net National Income (NNI), measures the total income of individuals, corporations, and government in the economy. For more information see measures of national income and output.

Income in Philosophy and Ethics

Throughout history, many scholars have written about the impact of income growth on morality and society. In particular, a number of scholars have come to the conclusion that material progress and prosperity, as manifested in continuous income growth at both individual and national level, provide the indispensable foundation for sustaining any kind of morality. This argument was explicitly given by Adam Smith in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, and has more recently been developed in depth by Harvard economist Benjamin Friedman in his well-acclaimed recent book The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth.

Income

Income, refers to consumption opportunity gained by an entity within a specified time frame, which is generally expressed in monetary terms. Usage of the term may, however, be somewhat ambiguous. For households and individuals, "income is the sum of all the wages, salaries, profits, interests payments, rents and other forms of earnings received... in a given period of time."[2] For firms, income generally refers to net-profit: what remains of revenue after expenses have been subtracted.[3] In the field of public economics, it may refer to the accumulation of both monetary and non-montary consumption ability, the former being used as a proxy for total income.