Client stories

Pages that stayed on the cupboard, and pages that waited.

These accounts use first names and a place, not a score. They describe a sitting this office actually offers. Where someone wished we had written less, that sentence stays in.

University Cost Briefing · 2025

The Pattani road was not the expensive part.

Hassan and Nur run a grocery on the ground floor of the family house in Mueang Narathiwat. The shutters come up after dawn prayers and come down when the evening customers thin out. Their elder child was in the last year of Mathayom. Two possibilities had been discussed at family meals for months: Princess of Naradhiwas University, close enough to sleep at home, and Prince of Songkla’s Hat Yai campus, where a cousin had studied.

They brought two fee sheets and a bus timetable. The tuition lines were not identical, but they were close enough that the table argument kept returning to pride and to faculty names. Anan asked where the student would sleep in the first week of term. The Hat Yai option needed a room, a deposit, a fan, and trips home. Those lines, placed beside the younger child’s private-school van in May, changed the year from “manageable” to “the van would have to stop.”

The household chose the university in the province. They kept the monthly set-aside already written for the younger child. Hassan later said the first conversation had assumed the grocery’s takings were steady through the monsoon; the sheet was corrected before it was final. The briefing did not pick a faculty. It made the lodging visible.

Family Education Savings Plan · 2024

Six terms, after a flood year with no entries.

Malee arrived with a savings book whose last education entry was the year the ground floor flooded. Two children were in school, one in a government primary and one in Mathayom at a private religious school. The invoices had been paid. Nothing had been written about the next November.

Laila separated the government-school costs, which were mostly activities and a tutor the family could pause, from the private-school term fee, which could not. The draft included a university appendix. Malee asked for it to be shortened. It was. The fee calendar stayed on the cupboard; the rest of the plan stayed in a folder. That was the right use of the paper for a household whose eldest was still years from Mathayom 6.

We came in with two school invoices and a savings book that had not been touched since the flood year. Laila laid the next six terms out in order and the November gap was obvious before we felt it at the cashier. I still think the university appendix was more paper than we needed while our eldest is only in Mathayom 2. The fee calendar is the page on the cupboard. The rest waits in the folder.

Malee W. · near Tak Bai road · Family Education Savings Plan

Anan asked which costs were already promised to the school and which were still our guesses. The van was promised. The tutoring was a guess we had been treating as a bill. The calendar got shorter, and the monthly figure finally matched the shop.

Farid N. · Mueang Narathiwat · School Fee Calendar

The home visit mattered because the shop closes late and the office hours do not. Nobody brought a product to sell. Our daughter is in Prathom 5, so the university pages are unused for now. I would have preferred those pages left out until we asked. The set-aside for the school years is the part we follow.

Siti A. · Khok Chian · Family Education Savings Plan

We had talked about Hat Yai as if the bus fare was the only extra. The sheet put a room, a deposit, and the younger boy's May invoice on the same page. We chose the campus in the province. The briefing did not tell us which faculty was wiser. It told us which year we could pay.

Hassan and Nur · a grocery under a family house · University Cost Briefing

Request a sitting if one of these situations is close to your own.