> £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.

You are in a relatively unusual situation in that you both have high-paying, central London careers that you don’t want to compromise on. Most people manage by:

• Going part-time/career break/condensed hours
• Spacing children
• Only having one
• Family help

Ime in most families, one partner (usually mother) wants to work part-time to be around for the kids more. I think as a society we should be enabling this option as much as possible.

It doesn’t have to be a binary choice between 2 years of 2x nursery fees and having your second at 38. Maybe give it 6 months and aim for a spring/summer baby in 2025? If you take a year’s mat leave, your first will be starting school not all that long after you go back to work.

Trying to conceive now, and getting an autumn baby, would also see you paying up to a year’s extra nursery fees overall.

Funding the mat leave and your mortgage increase feels like a bigger deal than the 2x nursery fees needs to be. Any scope to increase your borrowing to fund the short term cash flow strain?

Giving up one salary ia not the answer as even if entire net is going to childcare there are pension contribs etc still being paid.

Yeah that would have been scary times!

I don’t earn anywhere near £100k and I’m the breadwinner. I have a 2.5yr old and a 6 month old, and our mortgage is about to go up to £1800. Until the free hours for both kids kick in, it’ll be a bit nailbiting.

@WimbyAce has it, I think - you have to find a compromise. That’s the cost of having kids and I don’t think that’s so outrageous - creating a new human has costs. DH and I work compressed hours (9 day fortnight) so we can do 4 days rather than 5. This means we can’t apply for certain jobs that would further our careers, and we do have to put up with bosses grumbling at us sometimes for not being there that one day every other week, and I won’t promote as fast as I otherwise would. But it’s a necessary compromise in order to have kids - your life won’t just carry on as it was before unless you’re mega wealthy.

OP isn’t in the category of having her whole salary eaten to the point of having to give up work - she isn’t in the £2k a month median female salary category.

That said £2100 per month per child full time does seem bloody expensive. I have a friend in St Albans who says her local nurseries all charge around that and that is a bit horrendous. Full time, the nurseries around me in London (zone 2-3) range from 1700-2400 a month, and are mostly around 1700-1800 pcm. It is a lot. I sympathise that your local nurseries are a cut above that cost-wise, OP.

It's definitely widely known! Used to be Childcare vouchers, now changed to tax-free childcare. But you may not pass eligibility criteria.

@Scottishgirl85 I'm not talking about tax free childcare.

It's this site: https://www.workplacenursery.co.uk/

Same as free hours, you don’t get tax free childcare if you earn over £100k.

I think your mum is thinking about preschool/ playgroup back then.
We’re in the Southwest and my son is now 30 and it was £20 day when he went( plus nappies) and when my daughter went 11 years later it was £40/£45
DS did a morning a week at the local preschool in the last term before starting school and that was £3.60

Oh this. My very large public sector employer decided not to pursue. Massively depends on your employer.

I asked - 'for those of you paying this, how bad is it? How do you cope?'
Fair enough but I live in London too and observationally not that many people are doing x2 sets of nursery fees. So I imagine the reason why you’re not getting many answers of how people are coping are because people simply aren’t doing it. 3-4 year age gaps are typical. 50% of 6YO DD’s class are only children. Those that do have <3 years between kids are few in number but they all seem to have either a SAHP or employee a nanny (sometimes even both!) so it’s just the older child doing PT preschool for socialisation. I know that still doesn’t answer your question but I thought it might be a helpful insight as to why you’re getting the responses you are.

These costs are insane. How are people who are just over the free hours criteria going to pass their mortgage renewals, surely paying this level of childcare fees (from more modest salaries than those outlined by the OP), will spell not passing the bank tolerance test for inflation vs. income. For a more average family the 2nd child will surely prove almost impossible without ridiculous adjustments to lifestyle. When did 2 kid families become the pursuit of the wealthy?

I think the jury is out about whether these fall afoul of HMRC or not. There hasn't been a clear ruling. Our daughter's nursery offers this and my husband asked his employer if they would be willing to participate, and they declined as they weren't comfortable with the structure.

The childcare vouchers scheme has been closed to new entrants for many years. The replacement, tax free childcare, is only open to couples where both have an income under £100k.

@MidnightPatrol
I haven't read every single reply (most though).

Are you doing the salary sacrifice childcare vouchers?
If not, you both must sign up for the maximum amount now.

Regarding age gap, it will cost you the same in total whether you have 2 in nursery at the same time, or have a bigger age gap and have one at a time.
If you can free up some money, I'd stick with the smaller gap. Increasing your mortgage is a good option. As soon as you are down to 1 in nursery use the additional cash to seriously overpay and clear the extra borrowing.

Lots of people do lots of different things there's no one silver bullet

one or both people have flexitime and work 4x10hrs (+) in order to have an additional day off, childcare upto 40% cheaper.

one or both parents work a weekend day in order to tag in and out, childcare upto 40% cheaper.

These stack so you can reduce childcare by upto 80% if you do both. But this does mean no weekend days where the whole family is together, so it can be rough.

People get grandparents to take the children (even if just 1 day a week) depending on age, proximity, health issues and relationship. Reduces cost by 20% per day.

Good luck.

Not hugely helpful in terms of amount, and someone may have mentioned already but check with nursery if your sums should include a sibling discount. Ours offer 10% for sibling which is £200 extra a month.

I looked into the workplace nursery scheme but it required our HR department to do some admin work to set it up and maintain which they rejected out of hand.

@House4DS

Chikdcare vouchers was closed for new entrants in 2018. It has been replaced by ‘tax free childcare’.

I needed to space my kids at least 3 years apart to afford to have them. We couldn't have afforded two in nursery at once, one if us would have to quit work for a few years and that would affect our careers. We aldo couldn't afford to live in London.

It is outrageous. I think those with two either have family support or can afford to not rely on two incomes. And that’s the way going forward.

We will either need a huge age gap or to stick at one. We are earning about 30k each which I think (despite the MN demographic) is normal for lots of households.

OP, another option would be to borrow to cover the childcare costs.

Mine are a bit older now, but I had £3K+ monthly cost when they were at the nursery / pre-school stage, which has decreased to around £1.5K by primary school. And I also was / am a single parent, so only one income. I bit the bullet and arranged a loan deferred for 3 years to pay for the childcare, and the nursery at the time gladly gave me a 10% discount too for paying for a year for both in advance.

I finished paying off that loan only two years ago, but at least I clung to my career and things start looking better now.

Now, of course, is not as attractive as a few years ago with the new interest rates, but maybe you could secure it as a second charge on the house alongside the mortgage, and will be a bit more affordable?

Some of these replies are bonkers! You pay huge amounts of tax, and shouldn't have to think of having large age gaps or freezing your eggs and having IVF just to have a second child.

We wanted a small age gap, and to leave open the possibility of a third child (I'm 39) and so just went for it. My son is almost two, and I'm due with number 2 this month. Once my son is two, the fees for him drop by roughly £300 a month. Our nursery also does a 5% sibling discount - not huge but every little helps. We don't qualify for the 30 free hours or tax free childcare, and our mortgage has just gone up horrifically. We're exploring one of us seeing if we can drop a day, but that's not a given, as it's likely our workplaces will refuse.

Also, logistics are so important with young children I think, so I wouldn't be moving to a nursery further away just to save £200 a month. Ditto moving far from work - better to be a closer commute and get proper time with them in the mornings and evenings.

We will probably end up taking a loan out to cover childcare

We both earn less than the nursery cost so when we had our first I took 14m off then DH left work. Had our second within that year so DH went back to work and I took another 14m off. Then I went back and he left. We didn't earn enough for a nursery/nanny so we just did this tag team for a few years. That said neither of us have gone back full time til just now as the primary years are equally challenging with sickness/settling in/events and I have a front line job so can't call in sick or pick up early easily, if one of you works flexibly the primary years are easier!

Twins completely screwed me over in a similar scenario - although I’m not on as high a salary as you.

we bring in around £100k combined though so in theory should be very comfortable.

Childcare and cost of living in the south east has completely stuffed our finances.

we also had to get a nanny or I’d have been paying more than I earned in nursery fees

I’m in the similar situation OP. My second baby will arrive soon and we will have to pay over £4K nursery fees for just over a year until the older one goes to a state school, and we’re only eligible for 15 funded (not free) hours when they get 3. We’ll just have to bear with it for a year, using savings, cutting down some expenses like an extra car, flowers etc. We prefer nursery to nannies as nannies don’t seem very reliable in terms of sick leave, hours, quitting, and I prefer my children socialising with the other children and benefit from various nursery activities, which is so good for their development. If you plan to send them to state schools in the future, it’ll be only a couple of years being tight, and then hopefully a lot more cash flows will be freed up.

Could you wait until the older child is three and eligible for free hours? Or until they're at school? It depends on the hours you need though, you may find that school creates even more problems because you need to sort wraparound care anyway. Which is why a nanny is sometimes a better solution as they can do whatever you need them to do to fit around two children.
It is madness though. For us we just accepted it's going to be the most expensive time in our lives, we haven't done big holidays or put much in our pensions, and we've muddled through. This year has been better as I've been working in a much more flexible role which has allowed me to put the younger child (now three) in the nursery at DD1's school which is free for five days a week, 9-3.15. I have to do all my work in these (short!) school hours and when they are in bed at night. But because it's flexible, it is doable and so despite having DDs age 3 and 6 our childcare costs are basically zero. The truth is if you have an office job with long hours, it's really hard and the job has to pay really well for it to feel worth it! Good luck