In the past two years, your daughter's debt should have grown by just 1.5 per cent in June 2016 and then another 1.5 per cent in June 2017. But indexation was higher a few years ago; it was up at 3 per cent in 2011.

Now a year ago, the federal government applied an "overseas levy" to stop people skipping out on their local HECS for a time, or perhaps forever. The income threshold for compulsory repayments is the same as in Australia but includes Australian and overseas income. It was $54,869 in 2016-2017 (proposed to drop significantly), with the first expat payments to be made from July 1.

Say your daughter earned $AU90,000 in the last year living abroad … her overseas levy would be $6300. But that shouldn't be reflected in her HECS-HELP balance, which should only have ticked up by a couple of thousand dollars.

Could it be there were some final tuition fees added after her initial check? My feeling is getting a fee statement from the institution and reconciling this with the Australian Tax Office's records will clear up the matter.

With regards to whether to repay HECS-HELP early, I come down on the side of "no" too ... provided you invest the money to better effect elsewhere (or repay higher interest debts). At a 1.5 per cent benchmark return, that shouldn't be hard!