How much does uni really cost?

We give our DD £750 a month and pay phone contract and contact lenses on top so the equivalent of about £820 a month. Her grandmother gives her another £100 a month. She gets minimum loan and works during uni holidays as many hours as she can get at £12.21 per hour. Her rent is £800 a month inclusive of bills. She seems to manage ok for money as we virtually cover her rent and she has her loan and holiday wages to live on.

So you'll pay the rent, the bills are included and he'll have £500 a month to live on? I think that's probably achievable.

There were huge variations in our kids unis, some parents didn't contribute at all and others paid more than £500 a month and the rent.

My DS was in catered accommodation. He had £80 per week term time only (so 30 weeks) beyond his accommodation.

This was for going out, snacks, toiletries, joining clubs etc. He does drink but not loads. He had £250 left for a cheap summer holiday.

Apoarantky some had significantly less than £80 per week and some a bit more.

One thing to bear in mind is they sign up for 2nd year accommodation before Christmas in most places. They will prob need a deposit in region of £500.

I expected them to fund socialising in the hols with a job. Obv we fed and kept them. A summer job could earn them £1k in about 3 weeks.

We set up automatic weekly deposits into their accounts on MONDAYS, therefore having to plan carefully M-Th if they wanted money for the weekend.

Not RoI but in general after course fees and rent is paid about 500 pcm to cover food, toiletries, gym membership, clubs, mobile and activities seems to be about right if student is in halls so no electricity, gas water, TV licence to pay. If second year and no halls it's much more expensive.

It depends on the housing and meals accommodation.
with three who attended away from home; dorm room with zero appliances allowed, quad set up with kitchenette but mandatory cafeteria meal plan, quad set up with kitchenette no cafeteria on site, standard apartment shared off campus. On two occasions we needed to rent a small storage locker.

You need to consider

1. Rent
2. "Start-up" costs - the £260 a report for example, included the costs of buying things like laptops and phones and all bedding, kitchen stuff etc
3. "Normal" weekly things or reasonably frequent expenses. DD is easily managing on £100 a week (minimum maintenance loan in England)
4. "non-weekly" larger expenses such as travel, holidays, course books, course trips etc -DD pays for these from her summer job money

DD is not a huge socialiser, and generally buys drinks for home rather than spending a lot when she is out.

We pay her rent, and bought her "start-up" things. We also tend to buy a big food shop when we visit.

Depends on the student

list out the essentials- rent, any bills ? Tv, mobile? 50 a week for food? Cost of trip home at the end of each term? Bus fares depending where they live? 50 for going out with new friends ? Gym cost? Clothing? Some can get through a lot of shoe leather

you get people unable to go out on less than 50 a night and kids with that for the month

many get the full maintenance grant and it doesn’t really cover rent in most places so they need all their living costs from somewhere - some work and the lucky ones have mum and dad to help them out

Hello! It varies and depends on quite a few factors. Ignore any of the below you already know.

First of all the student needs to apply for a student loan. As you may know, this is in 2 parts: 1) is the £9k a year tuition fees, which are paid direct to the university and 2) is the maintenance loan, which is designed to be towards living costs but in reality doesn't cover the half of it, IME.

The second part (the maintenance loan) is based on parents' earnings so the more you earn, the less your student will be lent as the maintenance part of the loan. The max is about £8k IIRC if the parents earn under £25k.

Parents or the student therefore generally need to top this up, either via the student working or the parents contributing. To give an example, 2 of mine went to uni and got the minimum maintenance loan. So this was something like £4k a year to cover rent, food, going out etc. So that works out at about £390 a month.

Actual costs were much more: rent at £500 a month, bills at £130 a month plus we paid another £480 for food and various other expenses. Many people pay less or expect the student to work throughout uni.

We chose not to ask our kids to work so we paid the rent of £500 plus £480 a month for food and other expenses plus £130 a month bills so a total of £1.1k a month. When the loan came into our kids bank accounts (it's paid direct to the student) they gave it to us so we paid £1.1k x 12 months (£13,320 a year) less their £4k contribution from the maintenance loan. It was expensive and I'm glad we're not paying it any more! They both left university with over £50k of debt and it cost us £9.2k a year x 3 years x 2 kids.

I think it's a huge shock for parents the first time as I'm not sure how well understood the arrangements are. Good luck.