Looking like both kids are going to Bristol at the same time - how screwed am I?

[CottonOn]

Posting here for traffic.
Two kids, 13 months apart, both want to do aeronautical engineering, one girl starting this autumn, the second the next.

They’ll get the minimum maintenance loan. I’ve got roughly 20k set aside which I naively thought would give them a fairly pleasant 3 years. I’ve only just clocked that actually this isn’t nearly enough.

This is what the calculator is telling me

You could get a £4,767 Maintenance Loan to contribute towards your living costs.
How your Maintenance Loan is calculated:
£10,227 (the maximum Maintenance Loan available)

• £5,460 (the amount you might not be eligible for, based on your answers)

= £4,767 (the amount you could be eligible for, based on your answers)

I’m going to have to stump up £10,920 in the years where they are both there simultaneously just to get to the basic £10,227 and it ooks like accommodation is going to eat up 8k, so even that won’t be enough.

Can anyone tell me how much it’s realistically going to cost to top them up enough to live in Bristol? I’ve been so blithely naive all these years thinking I’d squirrelled enough away. Could kick myself.

pinkyredrose she's in private halls, as are her friends. Some of the houses were appalling and dearer than the halls. It's nearer £9000 when I think about it, ludicrous.
If I had realised second year was so expensive I might have tried to get her to live at home (we only live an hour away) and just bought her a car.

You should be googling for bursaries, like the Royal Aeronautical Society and be applying to as many businesses as you can.

Also look at women into science and engineering charities/organisations.

It’s an awful stress OP I REALLY, truly sympathise but I have found that the 8k/9k figures were always beatable for halls. Yes she won’t have an en-suite and yes will probably be living in a dump but it will be okay.

As for after halls, I just had a quick look on Spare Room and there are lots of rooms around the £650 a month mark with bills included. For your girls to cover half of that (you covering the other half) they’d only need to work something like 8 hours a week in a pub, bar or shop which will definitely be doable. It will be okay!

I’d very much like them to have MORE debt. They’ll already have 9250 per year in tuition fees and then the 5k living loan - this is the parental contribution we are talking about, not the loans. I hadn’t factored it in thinking they could borrow enough to live on.

No problem, I am an idiot!

YouveGotAFastCar was talking about Warwick and Leamington and the price increase, I was responding to their post. I was aware that the op had state her two dads where both looking at going to Bristol

@CottonOn start sewing the seed about degree apprenticeships.
Aerospace engineering offers lots!
My son is doing his with Airbus.
He is earning a good salary and no tuition fees.
Bristol has a good number of companies offering them, around Filton.

What stage of the process are they at? Has either of them considered an higher education apprenticeship so they can earn while they work towards their degree? Many aeronautical engineering companies round here offer them, but it is very competitive to get a place.

A lot of students studying in Bristol are being housed elsewhere due to the shortage of student accommodation in Bristol itself. Bristol unis are offering more student places than they have accomodation for, so students find themselves being housed in halls of residence in Cheltenham or in Wales. I'm not sure whether this would save them much money, because halls of residence tend to be expensive wherever you are, and they will have additional travel costs.

Sharing a room is not likely to be an option. Most student house shares/ HMOs are only licensed for a certain number of tenants and exceeding this could lead to penalties for the landlord.

Bristol is a fantastic city to live in.

@justteanbiscuits
If he can hack tutoring he should start now because there will be GCSE students at school whose parents will happily pay to make sure they get maths. If he gets a reputation he will get more students from lower years. He needs Zoom and he needs a bitpaper for each student, but if he can offer hour long tutorials he can probably do better than £15 per hour. Where I am English starts at £35 and maths pays better. If you have local coaching for the 11+ they might give him some Saturday work which worked well for one of mine.

@Whereareallthemillionaires

Neither of those are really in Bristol, the university is the other side of the city centre too.

The university is in the most expensive area of town and public transport is slow.

I'm 25 mins by car away (8 miles) and it's still £400k for a 3 bed

Yes, you might have gone to university with no parental help and no expectation of it. But that's no longer possible for most people now. The loan does not cover costs. Part time work, if you can find it and it fits around your course, does not cover costs. Work during the holidays, if you can find someone willing to take you on for a summer and without much work experience, does not cover costs.

It's as useful a point to make as telling someone in their twenties that it was still hard to buy your first home when interest rates were 15% on £50k when that flat would now have an interest rate of 6% on £400k and everything else has gone up in the meantime.

@CottonOn and another thought.....why not discuss this with your kids, so they know what options they have?
If they knew what money was available would they make different choices?
E.g. Sheffield is fabulous for aerospace engineering, Nottingham too. Both much cheaper, particularly Sheffield.

Well this has freaked me out! I have a 10 year old and 4 month old - next year it will be £17k in nursery fees for 4 days a week which I thought was bad but I hadn’t even considered “the other end”… so is the minimum loan £3kish and then is there anything loan/grant wise for the fees?

this feels never ending…

Instead of moaning about the level of student loans, and encouraging fraud in falsely claiming estrangement, I think we should complain more about all the private providers (from big companies to single landlords) and the ridiculous amounts they charge for rooms, shared bathroom facilities, en-suites etc. Their profits must be obscene.

Student loans are public funds and we all know how empty the public purse is.

@NotARealWookiie the fees are fine - the student pays them from a loan. The living costs are means tested on parental income. Anything over 25k starts a drop from the full amount and around 60k they get a fraction of the living loan. The full loan this year is just over 10k and as luck would have it accommodation where mine want to go is around 8k.

Youve plenty of time to fix it and your are well spaced (mine less so). Don’t panic 🙂

Well done to your DDs. Realistically engineering has such a heavy workload that it will be difficult to work in term time though. They really need to max out those summer jobs.
The good news is there are so many initiatives to encourage women into engineering that they may well be able to pick up some funding. My DC is in their Masters year of engineering and have been given £2k in January by the employer who has offered them a job when they graduate . Did your DDs do Arkwright? DC also got £1500 from uni in the first year for that. Your DDs need to get googling finance for women engineers. Good luck!

They need to plan to work full time in the summers to pile up money, It would be a good idea if they worked term time too.

Other options: student overdraft, work & save through gap year, or you can get an ordinary loan etc.

Make sure they don't have unrealistic notions of pissing around "travelling" every time there's a break.

I’ve only just figured out how to reply - apologies to all those I’ve quoted rather than answered - as you can see, they don’t get their brains from their mother 🙂

Also - if they aren't committed to a course yet, can they re apply for the degree apprenticeship type schemes? Where you get funded through degree.

We’ve paid accommodation for our three. Two at London! The older two did an extra year so it’s cost us an arm and leg. We didn’t top up beyond this as couldn’t afford more than that.

Instead of moaning about the level of student loans, and encouraging fraud in falsely claiming estrangement, I think we should complain more about all the private providers (from big companies to single landlords) and the ridiculous amounts they charge for rooms, shared bathroom facilities, en-suites etc. Their profits must be obscene.Student loans are public funds and we all know how empty the public purse is.

This - student accomodation has been a huge win for private equity, along with care homes, childrens homes etc. Often they'll claim there's not much profit but its because they strip it out via interest on loans and service fees etc

Its a swindle, there should not be profit from any of these.

A car would be cheaper and she'd have something to show for it at the end.

Just calculated that 8 grand a yr equals £666. a month! 👹 Evil, robbing bastards!

It is bad that many parents don’t know maintenance loans are means tested. Many people have small age gaps and 2 at Uni at once. It’s so hard. You are far from the only one OP who didn’t realise this.

DD is in her first year at Bristol, currently in one of the less salubrious city centre halls @Goatymum has mentioned, but expecting to pay 8K next year for a draughty hovel on a noisy main road with 9 others. At least she doesn't have to start paying rent till September, which is a rare treat for us. We're only still able to eat because I have inheritance money. But not for long...

Oh and DS2 earned 5k last summer working full time. This year he’s got an internship so will earn a bit less but will have some summer off