> £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.

It’s not just the staff cost, it’s the cost of the building. Rent is astronomical. One of friends owns a nursery group, I can assure you she’s not a fat cat on the profits.

Wow!

The CMs we saw were all over £1600-1700 so 1x FT place....

@Sunsetred @GreatGateauxsby

Childminders still seem to be charging £10 an hour (a discount for a full day) - and, they typically do shorter hours than a nursery.

In any case, as I mentioned further up the thread, there’s none within a sensible distance. On childcare.co.uk there are 0 childminders within a mile of my house. Driving a couple of miles before the commute to work is unrealistic - traffic is in any case gridlocked!

It costs the best part of a million pounds for a tiny house here - hence the lack of childminders IMO.

@Hio the economics of running a nursery in the midlands vs London are probably quite different due to the high cost of rent / living.

@saffy2

Interesting that your experience is of basically no children being in full time childcare.

Among my friends it’s universal - everyone works five days and use five days childcare. Bar one with a local grandparent who gets a day from them.

@WithACatLikeTread Yes stopping work isn’t realistic - or desired. The cost of living is very high! And longer term… would rather continue my career.

And - yes I’m aware I have a very good income.

The cost of two in nursery is ~80% of a £100k salary though which is really quite a lot of money, and a big commitment even if for 1-2 years vs the length of a mortgage

That’s strange, yeah as I said it’s normally very rare.
i would really try and wangle a way out of paying that amount personally however it is you do that. I don’t think things would suffer massively in your career if you did 4 days for 2 years instead of 5 for example. I am not suggesting you don’t work at all, I think that’s a bit crazy! But I do think many parents try and accommodate childcare somehow, eg changing working hours so you work from home and do some of it in the evenings when the kids are in bed, or work at the weekend when husband is home, or rope in family to help with childcare etc. not all feasible for everyone but just shows how different people do different things to get through the difficult and expensive time. And then you go back to what you’re doing now when one or both are at school and your childcare costs would be lower anyway.

My children are mostly grown up now (ages 8, teen to early 20s) but the only way to afford the baby/toddler stages of our family (on a standard salary) was for me to remain at home. I picked up term time work and sent my youngest to a nursery school age 3, paying a top up for wrap around care for the additional hours during term time. (Maybe Google your Local Authority to see where there are nursery schools near you, if you could consider term time only for a few years.)

Lifestyle choices included- older car, cheap UK holiday once per year, cheap days out such as the beach, park, museum, few meals out and virtually no spend on clothes/hobbies etc, minimal home improvements.

Being a sahm isn't for everyone, I'm just mentioning that the reality can be different than the expectation. Whatever you choose to do, you might consider it or pt work further down the line.

Overall I spent more than a decade at home. I studied for a degree through the OU to faciliate career development during that time.

And with two children you could downsize to a 2 bedroom house for a few years. My children really enjoyed sharing a bedroom until the teen years, at which point we made changes to enable this to happen. (Ours was a 3-bed we later converted to a 5 bed.)

Having another baby will almost certainly impact upon your current lifestyle, I'm just making suggestions that I haven't yet seen mentioned (admittedly I haven't read all 21 pages).

OP we moved to an interest only mortgage to manage the costs for a year

My experience is a good mixture of full time and part time but full time is far from unusual at DS's nursery. He certainly isn't the only full time one.

@GreatGateauxsby I'm in zone 3 so not sure if that's the difference? She charges £1040 for 4 days per week 8am-6pm. She did us a huge favour by charging us so little for the 6 months we had two DD with her until my DD3 was entitled to 30 hours free childcare and went to preschool. We've built up a beautiful friendship and she is now my DD1's godmother. I'm so lucky to have found her. She took my DD3 for £40 a day when her preschool was closed for 2 weeks at Christmas. She even took my DD3 to a kids birthday party yesterday that my DD3 knows through her.

Au pair are for ideally school age children or over 3yrs

As do 7/9 and 3/7 and learn/school theirselves 9/3

Not for babies /toddlers

Must be really frustrating for @MidnightPatrol to sift through all the comments either ignoring what they’ve already clarified or unsolicited fertility advice.

• free hours aren’t an option
• tax free childcare isn’t an option
• child 1’s full time nursery is £2300
• they're not moving out of London
• they're not delaying having their second child
• neither are giving up work
• both wfh a fair amount

Practical options are:

• a nanny will be cheaper than nursery. Ours is £15 per hour (net) for two (we have one plus twins but I am on maternity leave so also have one/am helping/not working. Twins were v. much unplanned!). As you need five days, stagger wfh days with DP so that a nanny can do 9-5 instead of 8-6 (commuting hours) that will save 10 hours a week, making a 40 hour a week contract instead of a 50 hour one. We pay per hour as she is part-time, you can suggest a private arrangement where they are salaried and their salary is £36k-40k a year with annual leave etc making it an attractive, long term role but getting some money back for the time the baby/ies are napping. Use Nannytax to work out more accurate coatings. Obviously a salary would be gross not net, which they’d need to be aware of. DM me if you want to know more about this when it comes to paying for toddler groups/activities/nanny expenses.
• go to an interest only mortgage for one or two years to reduce your outgoings and give yourself a buffer/less stress.
• Know that it’s just going to be a bit tighter for a while but worth it in the end (when they’re mid-thirties and start buying you lunch.

Good luck. Also, credit where credit’s due - it seems you and DP have got yourselves into an optimal financial situation ahead of starting/expanding your family. Which is more than most in their early-mid thirties!

OP, I haven’t read the entire thread so apologies if this has been mentioned before. It might be worthwhile looking at your eligibility for this and signing up, even with only one child in childcare. But it might help ease the burden of 2 in chidcare when it comes to that
https://www.gov.uk/apply-for-tax-free-childcare

Gosh a whole thread and you’re the first to even think about that! 🙄

I had a childminder. Cheaper than a nanny as a childminder is self employed and works from their own residence not yours.
she was a former teaching assistant who chose to stay at home and work when she had her DC.
She was fantastic but I know most people end up with 1 parent staying at home.

Wow!!!!
I hope you got her an AMAZING Christmas present…
we are zone 5/6 and frankly I don’t think I could have found a homeless tramp within 2 miles of my home to look after my DD for less than £1500 pm 😅😅😅

Bravo @Flamesatmytoes !
Plus it's capped at £2k a year. And isn't nearly as good for higher rate tax payers as the childcare vouchers were.

It does get easier I promise. When they get to 2 that's less to worry about and your own salary should increase too over the years...

Is your dh over the free cc too?

Otherwise if you’re not much over what about increasing pension

Here's how we worked it in zone 2 central london (ours are now 5 and 8):

• Had kids in spring 2015 and summer 2018.
• Left eldest in nursery while I was on mat leave for the younger for 9 months. We did qualify for 30 free hours so eldest went down to £900 a month shortly after younger one was born.
• My husband took a bit of parental leave after I took mat leave, so youngest didn't go full time at nursery till 1 year. So we only had 3 months of approx £3000 fees.
• Then eldest in school, youngest in nursery, and an au pair paid £120 a week. Our kids share a room to accommodate this.
• Youngest went to our local full time free school nursery (which doesn't means test - we wouldn't have qualified for 30 hours by then) the moment she turned 3.

So while we spent an eye-watering amount on nursery at times (and more than either salary), they were quite short. A 3 year age gap isn't that big, but hugely cheaper than 2 years. Easier if kids aren't autumn-born, although our wonderful school takes them full time at 3 regardless or time of year. Worth looking around for something similar.

Op I had my second child at 43 and my first at 36. You're being a bit silly. I really enjoy the age gap.

The main reason we have an age gap is so we avoided two sets of nursery fees. There's no way we could have afforded it. The age gap is bigger than we had planned as we had to put things on hold whilst we moved house and whilst I changed jobs, then it took a bit longer tjsn we expected.

I like the 6 year age gap. The girls adore each other. It takes the pressure off. With both of us working full time, it's easier only having one set of extra curricular activities to organise. I love having a young child, and I get to enjoy this for longer with the age gap. I'll be glad of only having one teenager at a time!

I am a Childminder in Northampton. I charge £5 per hour. My daily rate is £50. This thread is bonkers😂

@AntiHop

I am not ‘being silly’.

Advising I wait until I’m 40 to have a second child is hardly good advice. The older you are the higher risk the pregnancy - and the less the likelihood of getting pregnant at all.

I know multiple childless women in their early 40s regretting they didn’t try to have children earlier - with several miscarriages and numerous failed IVF cycles between them.

Great that this worked for you and you had a second child at 43, but this isn’t some foolproof plan (!).

I also don’t want such a large age gap - it means a decade or preschool children, and they will always be too far apart in age to want to do the same things.

It shouldn’t cost vastly more than the average salary to put two kids in nursery - no wonder the birth rate has fallen off a cliff.

You keep saying this. What advice are you after? Yes it’s enormously expensive. You either suck it up through gritted teeth (you can afford it) or you get a nanny as a child minder isn’t an option. Or you do what countless other people do and explore you or your DP dropping their hours slightly. It’s v industry specific but plenty of women make big jobs work on 4 day weeks/9 day fortnights, and frankly men just have to step up. As a previous poster said, there is always an element of compromise and you seem unwilling to accept that. It’s is literally just a couple of years of your life.

Even by London standards you live somewhere with exceptionally high childcare costs. Thinking of high earner couples I know who are at the baby and toddler stage they (myself included) actually live in areas that you would probably have discounted. Even one of the partner’s at my DP’s firm lives in an unfashionable bit of SE London. Also most of my friends have been grateful for the 15 hours free (barely anyone gets 30 hours in my circle).

This comment sums it up perfectly