> £4,000pcm nursery fees

[MidnightPatrol]

For those of you paying this, how bad is it? How do you cope?

I am hoping to have a second baby but it’s going to cost ~£4,200pcm (ignoring any future fee increases…!) in childcare for a year or two.

Slightly terrifying, particularly in context of higher interest rates / higher cost of servicing a mortgage when I come off my low interest deal next year.

^ this. I had my DC in my early 30s and I'm easily the youngest of my "mum friends" from DC's schooling. Easily. I just had my 40th, but I've been to more 50ths than 40ths among my friends.

If you were 40 already this would be a slightly different conversation, but most people who want to have a family in their late 30s do so fine. Newer data shows the drop-off in fertility starts at 38 not 35. It's your life and your risks to balance, though.

How old is your first child? You will be eligible for free hours if your adjusted net income is less than £100,000 for the tax year (assuming your partner's is as well) so if you're off on maternity leave and receiving reduced pay for some or all of the year then you will be eligible for that time.

Even if you'd still not be eligible for free hours, your first child won't need childcare until you're both back to work after maternity/SPL, so provided your first is off to school within a year of No 2 arriving then it may be possible to manage it that way. If the overlap is short, could it be managed by reducing nursery hours for your first whilst you're on maternity leave?

I do sympathise, it feels like a very convoluted maths puzzle sometimes. I'm (just) 36 with one child and I have calculated the earliest possible date I could start TTC in order to have a second and not bankrupt myself in the process. It's later than I'd ideally like but the reality is we can't afford to do it any sooner.

We pay £4,000 per month in SW London - would be even higher if my 3yo didn't get her 15 universal funded hours. Yes, we are sufficiently high earners that we aren't entitled to the additional funded hours or tax free childcare, but we aren't so wealthy that we don't miss that £4k per month! It's more than our mortgage.

It's worth it to us because we each clear more than that amount post tax, so even with the cost it's still worthwhile for us to work. Also, neither one of us wants to be a full time carer, and neither of our careers accommodates part time or compressed hours. On the plus side, our children are each in a setting that they enjoy and we are very happy with, so at least we're not paying all that money AND saddled with parental guilt!

If you send your kids to state school, just imagine how wealthy you'll feel once you stop paying nursery fees! In the meantime, I know some nurseries offer sibling discounts, so perhaps look into that?

Good luck!

The figures are not common but the scenario is.
Can you muddle through for the 2 years? Ie do you have enough coming in to cover it?
Are you taking full year maternity? Can you add on leave or take a spell of unpaid leave ( think about your parental leave entitlement for you plus partner?
Can you go interest only on your mortgage for a year or so?

If I wait until the eldest is in school I will be 38+.

While this is a fine age to have a baby, I’d rather not ‘risk’ leaving it so late.

I also don’t want such a large age gap - nor to be in the ‘baby and toddler’ phase for the best part of a decade if possible. Makes work even more complicated IMO.

@tealweasel yea it’s annoying isn’t it. A friend just had to take four months unpaid leave at the end of their maternity leave, because otherwise they’d be paying to go to work before the 30 hours kicked in. They are a teacher. Hopeless.

How old is your current child? If they are already in nursery I'm assuming at least 1? If you're not pregnant yet then they'll be at least 2 before you have another baby. So if it all happened very quickly you'd only have the scenario of two in nursery for 2 years, it's tough going but its also not forever. You could wait until you're 37 and then you won't have two in nursery at once, but you'll just be stretching the fees out.

I will however say it is absolutely lovely to be on mat leave when your oldest starts school. You can get them nicely settled and don't have to worry about dealing with all the short days and phased starts. I'd highly recommend it!

@belladonna22 your situation sounds much like mine. Ditto on earning enough I’m not eligible for the free hours / tax free childcare, but not so much the numbers are painful.

The mortgage piece is a scary unknown too - given the insane scale of borrowing to afford a modest home within a sensible distance of the city.

We can’t really do compressed hours or ‘take a break’ either, it would be too damaging to our careers.

I’ve seen so many women fall out of the workforce after having a second child, even in quite senior jobs. It’s incredibly frustrating.

Fair enough, but this situation is entirely self-inflicted.

It’s fine to have a preference for a smaller age gap and shorter baby/toddler phase, but it is not essential at your age. You could quite easily wait a couple of years.

@MidnightPatrol Sounds like we're in similar boats, I'd very likely be at least 38 by the time of a second unless everything happened very quickly after starting to try (which it didn't last time round). I can manage my way under the £100k cap with a combination of pension contributions and taking account of maternity leave time (and am 'lucky' in that my husband earns nowhere near the limit) but aware that isn't going to be manageable for everyone.

Whatever you decide to do, I wish you luck.

@tealweasel yea it’s annoying isn’t it. A friend just had to take four months unpaid leave at the end of their maternity leave, because otherwise they’d be paying to go to work before the 30 hours kicked in. They are a teacher. Hopeless.

Your friend would not have been “paying to go to work.” Childcare costs are a household expense so unless she was a single parent they would have been a shared expense which her partner would also have been responsible for. You never hear men saying childcare costs mean they are “paying to go to work”. Thinking in terms of her “paying to go to work” implies that a woman is solely responsible for childcare which is obviously not the case.

@Crushed23 ‘this situation is entirely self-inflicted’.

Literally every two child family in Britain has the challenge of working out how the hell to afford the nursery fees.

It isn’t really that radical for a family to have two kids with an age gap of less than four years.

How much over the threshold are you for the free hours? Could you make extra pension payments to bring you under the threshold?

@Mumsanetta sure, childcare fees are a shared household expense.

But if you take home £2,400 a month, and your childcare costs are £3,200 a month - it’s costing money to go to work vs staying at home.

Lots of parents (and particularly women) stop working because they can’t make the cost of nursery work - let’s not cloud that reality.

Do you have extra room / space? You could get a live in nanny which will be cheaper. Or if you can combine part time work for a while + an au-pair? (cheaper still)

The answer is to have a bigger age gap.

It's shit isn't it OP? Government keep bleating on about how they provide enough help with childcare when they really don't. It's bonkers we pay for kids to be in school until 18 but not for small children to attend nursery. They bang on about getting more people into work but their draconian policies force parents out of the work place. It's a broken system! And for those saying self inflicted or having children is a choice etc so is getting dental work done but I still pay taxes towards NHS dentists that I cannot use due to them being full or towards pensioners when I am not one or benefits that I am not eligible for and never claimed. Without children the ageing population would be pretty screwed

You are 35. You still have plenty of time. I timed my 2nd to be born when my first entered reception (I was 37). It meant only one nursery bill at a time and also more time one-to-one for both of them as I wasn't balancing the needs of two littler ones.

It just seems so obvious.

I see age gaps of 3.5+ years all the time? And OP is only 35. What am I missing??

You will still get 15 funded hours though even if you’re not eligible for the 30 due to income. That will help a bit. I think you have to see it as short term pain that will ease once eldest is in school. Most people don’t pay full double nursery fees for long unless twins.

eg
year 1: child 1 - pay full nursery age 1-2

Year 2: child 2 born when eldest 2 - at this point you have a decision to cut-down hours or drop out of nursery while on mat leave. But with places now so hard to come by likely still having to pay for nursery. This is fine if maternity package good- much harder if not.

Year 3: return to work with a 3yo and 1yo but 3yo should get 15 or 30 funded hours for term time plus fees in baby room for 1yo. This is the killer year.

Year 4: unless you have an autumn born eldest should be going to school at some point so you’d have wrap around care plus nursery for youngest. Still expensive but not as bad as the year before.

Brexit killed au pairing, but it doesn't matter; au pairs are not suitable sole charge childcare for preschool age children.

@MidnightPatrol something to note - everyone gets 15 hours funded childcare, irrespective of earnings. It doesn’t knock a huge amount of the bill, but does help

I think some of these responses are a little disingenuous. It is a ridiculous state of affairs that anyone should pay £4k a month for nursery fees. Ridiculous. It doesn’t matter what anyone earns, that is a ludicrous amount for childcare.

OP - we had a year or so of double nursery fees and paid £3k a month for ours (SW London and MIL did 1 day a week for us), my take was that it was only a year and basically, you have to pay that money anyway. So if it’s double childcare for a bit, or single childcare for longer, the total amount is still the same.

really sucks though

Another reason for a larger gap is at other end you’ll be expected to fund thousands towards university maintenance as they only get minimum loan. Two at Uni together can be a big burden but not in nursery fees league.

Childminder?

Because the OP doesn’t want a big age gap, or to start trying for the 2nd later in her 30s, both of which are totally understandable

I stopped working!

I had my children later than you, I was 42, 43 and 45 so I had 3 under 3 and a half.

I’d always worked full time, commuted etc and I was unwilling to spend my entire take home salary on nursery fees just so I could work longer hours and miss my children altogether.

For me, I was faced was needing to pay a nursery bill that was more than I was earning!

So I decided to stay home and cut back and I don’t regret it at all.