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?

Knowing about it in advance isn't much help if you're not earning enough to save to cover it though. It would take us a good 8 years from now to save enough to cover the drop in salary for Mat Pay and also half the nursery fees for one child (at today's nursery prices). That's assuming we can maintain the amount we put aside each month, in actual fact over the last few years our expenses have increased as a percentage of our salaries so we have less disposable income to save each year.

Well if you can't save for it in advance then it definitely won't come out of your monthly income. You could save up enough to reduce to full hit of the monthly cost in advance though.

I do think it is a crap situation. I'm not here saying that is easily achieved.

I completely disagree with this. I would love to be a stay at home parent and couldn’t. It’s not an option. Our mortgage is £1k alone and that’s living in Yorkshire. With cost of living / electricity prices we would be net £0 every month and that’s without any unexpected car payments / broken boilers etc. And before you ask we have second hand cars with no car payments, not the latest phones, we don’t eat takeaways often and most definitely don’t buy coffees or avocados.

I agree, we're the same! If we had a child, I would have to go back to work within a few months as we would need the money, even if nursery was free.

Having a child costs more than just the pounds and pence of it, don't forget. It's a huge sacrifice in terms of potentially long-term as well as short-term risks to the mother's health, the cost of time poured into rearing the little tot, the cost of the mother's earning potential after the child is grown, her pension pot, etc.

We are an increasingly atomised society, where these costs are borne solely by the couple having the child, and the lions share of that risk within the couple being borne by the mother, with no multi-generational support network to help when things go wrong, or even when they go right.

Having a child is being increasingly seen as a risky decision, and rightly so. If society sees the continuation of the species as important, those risks need to be acknowledged, and properly ameliorated. And I don't see that happening any time soon, frankly.

The consequence of that for women is that they lose their earning potential and become financially dependent on their partners. If they ever find themselves needed to leave their partners they’ll be trapped.

Move to Luton, they have the highest birth rate, for some reason.

We don't know anyone our age managing to save more than a couple of hundred pounds per month, all living very frugally, as the wages just haven't kept up with the cost of living. It's become a regular discussion now we're all turning thirty/in our early 30s and wondering when we'll have children. None of our friends can afford to pay even half of nursery costs out of their current salary, or save enough to cover the other half either.
The only friends we have who have children /are trying for children are those with family support (either money or childcare or both). Oh there is one couple where the husband has a very high salary actually, works for his dad in the family business, they can afford childcare but I have asked, he can't get us all high paying jobs 🤣

well according to the daily mail you can have 7 kids, not bother to work and get a 5 bedroom house 🫣

Ok, so that worked for you.

But vary the scenario slightly and it’s not practical. I am a solicitor and a mother. Absolutely nobody would employ me for those hours. Should I just forego my years of experience and dedication to my profession?

Way to plunge women back to the dark ages. The solutions on this thread seem to revolve around making women dependent on men and becoming SAHP’s. How depressing.

Life is and has always been a matter of choices.

Yoi can't have expensive large house in nice zip code, a car, holidays overseas, fancy clothes and so on and children unless ypu have a posh job.

We have all been there. Less can do but not all settle for it.

That depends on what you earn as to whether this is possible. If you are on a minimum wage job then it's not. And it's not always that easy to earn more.

I don't think so although I'm not sure

My friend is from London originally. Several friends she grew up with still live there. Three of them got pregnant young and all three got council housing. Lots of their neighbours have more than two children. They go to the top of the list for rehousing if classed as overcrowded although nowadays it's often still a long wait.

Things have changed since my friend's friends times but lots of younger people in London, and I assume other expensive areas, still have children but many get stuck in temporary accommodation for years. It's a roof over the head but often pretty unpleasant, although one girl my friend grew up with actually chose to do this. She openly admits she got pregnant to get housing. It's not something I'd recommend because she apparently had to spend three years in grotty temporary accommodation but I can understand why she did it. The older sister didn't have children but became ill (after working for years) and had to move back in with her mum. If she didn't have her mum to live with she'd be in real trouble because people from that part of the country without children have almost no hope of getting council housing. The older sister's story makes me think about some of the replies on here. Particularly the poster on a low wage. If you don't have children and at some later point become unable to work, you'll have nowhere to live (unless you have family you can move in with). It would be very wrong to have kids just to get housing but if you want children anyway, be careful about losing the chance. The friend's sister ended up with no children but no housing either.

Where there's a will there's a way.

If you want kids bad enough you'll find a way.

Are you kidding me 😂 we couldn’t even pay rent and bills on one salary, even without a child. We live in a crappy village in the north. What planet are you on?!

Well @Trunchball24 I am really surprised at that; surely loads of people would like to see a solicitor at weekends/in the evening?

Perhaps a new career opportunity for you setting up your own solicitors offering a female based service?
You can credit me when you have a chain of office around the world 😂

We are having one! But probably can’t afford two

They're trapped anyway because of the high cost of housing that's particularly unaffordable for single earners. The issue that really needs addressing is the cost of living and housing. If it went back to being affordable to live on one wage, couples would be able to afford children with a SAHP, either the man or the woman can do that btw, instead of paying someone else to do the valuable job of childcare and housekeeping. It is a valuable job and should never have been devalued. At the same time women (pr men) wouldn't be trapped in bad marriages because they'd afford to live on one wage

I work nights and we have help from Grandparents, so only have DC in nursery 2 days a week.

Night shift....weekend work....work from home. People will move careers and jobs and everything to have a baby if they want one to make it work.

Housing will never be cheap again. We don't have enough housing for nearly 67m people, unless there's a huge house building plan over the next few years. There isn't enough housing stock and the price will always reflect that shortage.

Net migration to the UK was over 600,000, in the year to June 23.
That's a city bigger than Sheffield and Leeds.
Do we need more births?.

I mean I do work evenings and weekends but my work revolves largely around “core hours” which are usual business hours.

Transactions happen when the banks are open and able to move money around and when other solicitors are available to act for the other party.

Me working would mean the rest of the office having to work to facilitate my completions. You can tell Jill in accounts she’s up for weekends and evenings from now on and pull her away from her G&T and Coronation Street.

So we should continue to stack the cards against women who want to be mothers in this country - because we can import tax-payers from elsewhere?

I absolutely agree that sometimes it’s not wanting to compromise on lifestyle but I disagree about the sahm part and living on one salary. We Have decent salaries but we couldn’t pay all our bills on one salary. We live in an expensive part of the country. We can comfortably pay bills, nursery costs and have a decent disposable income with both mine and DHs salaries however. I can see how people on lower incomes would struggle.