Cost of uni for parents

[TeenLifeMum]

I’ve read multiple threads on here about the cost of uni and parents supplementing about £800 per month. Is this your experience?

my question is really aimed at those who earn too much to qualify for anything above the minimum loan but aren’t crazy rich.

For context, I wonder if I need to plan for remortgaging or getting a loan to support all 3dc through. One will have one cross over year but the other two are twins so will be the same time. I don’t have a spare £2,400 per month available. Hoping for some real life experiences. (I do expect dc to have a pt job but wouldn’t expect lots of hours).

Another thing to consider is that for some courses it prevent some kids going uni altogether

i’m thinking courses like medicine, dentistry etc where you go where you are accepted because they’re so tricky

they choose you rather than you having choice

for some kids not getting in their closet eg med school means they can’t go at all and that’s such a shame as many potentially excellent doctors being disadvantaged.

I’m giving DS £50 a week. He would have had a further £30 a week from his child trust fund but he blew the 4 years worth of that in year 1 so is now having to live with the consequences. He’ll need to get a job this year and forgo his £400 a month takeaway habit.

My son worked 16 hours a week at M & S to supplement his income all year round not just holidays . His dad gave him £ 35 towards food but he still needed extra from us for his rent.

Wouldn't it be worth buying a two bedroom flat and letting a room out to offset the costs rather than using halls or renting? That's what my parents did 20 years ago for my brother, the value of the flat went up too.

Yes, because everyone can stump up 100k for a flat to rent out 😒

Shows how out of touch some people are with others reality ! There's most of us scrimping by trying to sling our kids a few hundred a month to help them out and forgoing things ourselves, and then there's one who comes up with the solution of just buying a flat for them. You couldn't make it up really. Unbelievable !

Well if you are paying around £600-£700 a month on halls then the mortage on a roughly £100k 2 bedroom flat with a ten percent deposit would work out about the same.

This is us right now. DD goes next week. We wanted to save, but we just couldn't afford it until the last couple of years when our finances increased and we have had so many 'issues' to pay for in that time. We're 'OK' financially now, not wealthy by any means, but comfortable. It'll be back to being a real squeeze when she goes as we'll sub her by about £500 a month to top up her accommodation and her living expenses. We do expect her to get a job too.

Assuming people have a 10% and would be accepted for a mortgage AND assuming that people will be able to pay for 10/15/20 plus years.

We are actually considering doing it but you can't just assume people can do this even if they want to

Christ, 500 quid a month on top of wherever they get from maint loan and whatever they earn in thier p/t job?

Uni is supposed to be tight money wise but it seems like many parents are willing to fund a luxurious lifestyle.

£500 per month (term time only) is not a luxurious lifestyle for someone on minimum loan. It just about brings them up to the level of someone on maximum loan. Depending on rent that could equate to £40-80 per week to live on.

Eh? The maintenance loan if you get minimal doesn’t cover the rent in some cases and there is no student loan like there was for me for living expenses as it goes directly on tuition fees - my DH had to pay them but still had loads of loan left for living. Neither of us had a part time job in term time as we had to study for a degree. In holidays we both worked but not in term time, I only knew one person that worked in term time. It is not luxurious to expect a roof over your head and to eat!

In fact are you speaking from experience, do you have a teenager off to uni and you’ve been means tested and get the minimum loan as its hounds like you don’t really understand the process.

Average cost of accom is 155 pw, assuming 46 week contract that 7120 a year. Min maint loan is 4767 - subtract 7120 that gives just over 200 quid a month extra needed for accom.

Add 100 quid a month for food that's 300 quid a month - no where near the 500 quid a month example I commented on before.

Yes.

I've also just finished 10 years of study myself (undergrad > PGCE > Ph.D).

To give you an idea

My son's maintenance loan for next year is £4,767.00
His halls rent is £7,600

That leaves him with a balance of -£2,833 to live on

We give him just over £450 per month which spread over the year gives him £50 ish per week to cover food, phone, travel, clothes, equipment. It's not enough so he has to work.

£100 a month for food is pretty frugal.

And even if you are living on beans, what about everything else?

Transport, clothes, toiletries, books (DD is buying her mandatory "must own" reading list second hand and it's still not that cheap), laundry, phone; insurance.

Your student living away from home needs basic cooking equipment, bedding, laptop etc. Unless you have items you can just give them, there is a cost to buying even second hand as cheap as you can (DD has just bought 2 plates and 1 bowl for the princely sum of £1.50 from a charity shop).

You're getting close to £500 a month on just covering essentials.

And then their part time job enables them to afford "luxuries" like gym membership or the odd social drink.

yes, I forgot laundry. I think circuit laundry is around £7 a pop.

I take it you don't have a child at Uni yet, because you don't know what you're talking about if you think she'll have a 'luxury' lifestyle. She's going to an expensive city, her maintenance loan pays for approx a third of her accommodation costs.

@amigafan2003 I've just seen that you do have a child at uni. Surely you understand you can only comment on the accommodation/costs for them only, just as I can only comment for mine? They won't be the same. Some places are more expensive to live than others, DD is going to Edinburgh, it's not cheap.

If you did your undergrad 10 years ago costs have skyrocketed sine then. There is a big difference even from what my daughter needed back in 2018-2021 and what my son need now.

Doing a PHD after you have been working for several years or even alongside working and where you may be part of a family unit sharing costs is not comparable to a single person living in university halls.

Well quite. Dd's costs in Liverpool are much lower than ds's costs in Leeds. Both are way lower than students in places like Brighton or Bristol have to face.

DD left uni last year. Her maintenance loan just about covered her accommodation and we gave her £400pm which covered her food, heating, clothes, going out (more for coffee as they socialised in flat a lot), transport home (330 miles away).

She tried but couldn't get a job during the first few months, came home for lock down and got a job which luckily found holiday work. She then applied for work through uni, got turned down for job she applied for, but they gave her a leadership job as she'd already got some work experience. In reality we didn't need to give her so much once she found work, but she did save which is handy in case she gets a job further away requiring a car sometime.

Get them to seriously consider apprenticeships. Are unis still worth it? I've heard of afternoon 'lectures' just being videos of the lecture given in the morning to other students. The interest on the debt is high too.

So you have a teenager at university?