Cost of living in the UK v the birth rate

[Potterpot]

I was reading an article where a young couple living in an expensive part of the country said they wouldn’t be able to afford having kids so they’ve made peace with that decision. I can understand why, especially after seeing on another thread that some people’s full time nursery bill costs £1600 a month for one child. The UK average property price at current rates is £1300 a month. That’s £3000 gone, before you’ve even thought about council tax, utility bills, food shopping, travel, saving, disposable income.

I understand being able to make the short term sacrifice financially to afford one child.

Unless one parent can be a SAHP or have significant family help, how are people affording two? Do you have to be high earners for this lifestyle now?

10 years ago I read an article that stated that you needed to be earning £40k /year to break even with 2 kids in nursery/chikdcare. The cost of childcare has risen exponentially. Only yesterday I read about a lady paying £4k/month for 2 kids. Most people can’t afford that.

You can buy a 3 or 4 bed detached house in my town for that. Long way from London though.

That would leave us (£65k combined income) with literally nothing left for anything else, at all. Not being dramatic, maybe we could pay that childcare bill and the water bill.

I am also up north and it’s very difficult to find a property below that price. Most are much above. Times have changed

And £1300 a month on a 240k house isn’t an exaggeration unfortunately! Anyone paying less than this has either a large amount of equity or fixed years ago at a lower rate.

If you are buying a house this value in 2024, it’s the minimum of what you’ll pay.

There's "up north" and "up north".
Some places still have reasonable housing costs, but it's not always where people want to live of course!

What would that one salary have to be in London & the South for people living in a private let?

One unpleasant tradeoff includes being made to feel unwelcome by people like the poster who says

I don't want a load of incomers!

With the situation below

very sorry you were widowed and that does sound incredibly tough but...

When was this? £18000 a year wouldn't even cover mine or my friends annual mortgage or rent costs, let alone anything else! That's £1500 a month. How much were you paying in mortgage?!

I don't know the widowed poster's circumstances (I'm also very sorry they were widowed) but it could be they had a Right to Buy and so a very low mortgage.

There was more social housing available in the past and having children was a good way to get it (still is in some parts of the country, which btw answers the original question of how some lower earners can afford to have children).

The problem today and the difference with the past is the need today for two wages to afford housing. Unpopular opinion but it was a bad move imo pushing to have to both parents in full-time work. There's nothing wrong with SAHPs and personally I think it's a very important job that's been wrongly devalued. It is a job btw. Nowadays it's simply outsourced (at great cost) to other people. Childcare, housekeeping, and later in life caring for elderly relatives.

I’m in a middling part of the country. The people I know with two kids are one or more of these:

high earners
financially supported by family
childcare provided by family
no one working, all on benefits (don’t come at me, I’m literally just listing people I know)
opposite shift workers so no childcare costs
big age gaps so one child is at school before nursery fees kick in for the second

The only families I know with three are extremely high earners or independently wealthy.

Yes but that was sometime ago and in recent years we've had house price inflation at about 8x and wage inflation at about 2.5x so a single parent in your situation would be able to afford about 1/3 of the housing you could.

Whether one likes it or not a nurse and a teacher (so two professional jobs but ones that don't earn mega bucks) would struggle to afford a 2/3 bed house and childcare for 2 pre-school children in London.

I did the same and I could not disagree more.

Housing, utilities and childcare take up a much higher proportion of household incomes today because salaries have not kept up.

I don't believe it's a choice actually. I think for many young professionals working in high cost areas it's become so difficult that they just won't have children.

It's interesting that young professionals are told to move to a cheaper area, possibly away from family whereas people on benefits are told they shouldn't have to move from where they were brought up or away from family, even if it's somewhere like London, because they need the support and 'why should they'!

I wonder how long it's going to take for the general population to understand that the people who aren't having children are generally the ones we want to be having children. They are also the people paying most tax, who are highly qualified and who are most likely to emigrate. Controversial I know but unfortunately the UK needs to face facts.

Totally agree. And up north. I’m pregnant with our first and likely only baby (unless we win the lottery!)

Tbf, childcare isn't a surprise outlay though. It's a known-known. Expecting to cover that expense from monthly income is a stretch and an unnecessary one with forward planning.

University top up fees are far less arduous on monthly finances but most of those parents who can will build a nest egg so that it takes less of a toll.

I agree it’s a choice. But …opting for children comes at a cost which is massively unevenly loaded onto women.

if the government wants women to have more children, it will have to stop ignoring the following :

… the awful state of maternity. services

… the huge cost of childcare

… the huge cost of housing

… the fact that for most people, paying back uni loans hits just at the point where a couple have taken out a mortgage and have to cover childcare costs too

… that CMS is not fit for purpose. When finances are already balanced on a pinhead for most families, when one partner walks out and finds it ridiculously easy to hide income, shield income, pay too little to make a dent in the real cost of children, or just not pay/not turn up to do their share of the parenting, just getting by turns into poverty

Exactly. Some friends, a teacher and a social worker, bought their three bedroomed house in a leafy suburb of London, without family help in the 80s. They raised three children there, and say that their own children could not possibly afford to do what they did, even though they on the face of it, have better paid careers.

Wait so does that mean people living in cheap parts of the country are having far more children?

You're probably not as far north as me! You could get a 3 bed semi from 110k here, that wouldn't cost £1800 a month for a mortgage.

I'm in my mid twenties, a SAHM with two young children. My husband earns less than £30K, and I think normally our circumstances would qualify us for UC but we have savings over the limit. We own our home which we bought with no family help just before I fell pregnant.

We both grew up working class, and my own family situation was very, very financially troubled. My mum and her mum too are both absolutely top class penny pinchers though, which has very much rubbed off on me. I've been saving money towards home ownership since aged 12, which does sound a little mental 🤣 but I'd grown up seeing first hand how difficult it is to get a foothold on money and finances. I've always worked different jobs since age 12 until I became a SAHM, including multiple jobs all throughout uni, and I've been saving as much as possible since then.

It has been fine, but we've just started noticing things getting too tight for our liking. We don't want to have to start dipping into savings to cover living costs. So I've just started a part time job that's just in the evenings after my children are asleep and my husband is home to look after them.

I am proud of how we've made things work. But I'm conscious that everyone's situation is different in thousands of different ways.

I also think some people don't want to make lifestyle sacrifices in order to make having a child work - there are things I'd love to do and buy that most people take as normal spending (beauty stuff, new clothes, nice car etc) but I can't if I want our family set up to work financially. Other people wouldn't want to live as penny-pinching as we do in order to make having children work financially, and that's absolutely fine and a valid choice.

£1,300 mortgage seems low to me! We live in the south east as there’s good jobs and it’s near our family and friends. We cant just move somewhere random that is very cheap for housing. There is an element of choice but that’s fine. We’re expecting our first and we know we’ll have to make sacrifices in terms of holidays; treats etc.

Yes this. We’ve lived very very frugally over the years - old car, all clothes 2nd hand, very tight budget for food etc. Things have been tight but we have 3 children and are very happy with the way things are. I work 2 days, dh isn’t considered a high earner, but we manage. Once we stop paying for child care we will feel like millionaires!

Our house costs the same as yours but our mortgage is only £650. I wonder why yours is so high. We have 2 kids and I'm a sahm, we make it work.

It’s hardly surprising the birth rate is falling - combination of cost of living vs salaries, and that is is a genuine choice for most couples nowadays. And it’s much more acceptable to openly say you’ve chosen not to have kids. Better than people having them when they don’t really want to. There’s plenty of people on the planet.

£240k with a 10% deposit, at HSBC's current 90% LTV rate of 4.65%, fixed for 5 years and over 30 years = £1100 per month. HSBC are not known for cheap mortgages, so I suspect there may be better deals out there with the same inouts.

I could well imagine some people paying £1300 - but it's not the minimum you would pay.

Very good points. I'm one of only a couple of my mum friends who has a fairly standard birth story. Almost everyone I know who's given birth lately seems to have had some sort of bad complication or adverse event seemingly due to failings of the healthcare system.

Can hardly blame my as-yet childless friends for being put off when they're hearing most of us who've had children tell stories of being treated like dirt during birth and/or being medically neglected.