When were your children most expensive?

[RoamingToaster]

I’ve noticed some people saying children are more expensive as they get older. Is that true for you? I’ve paid for nursery which is a lot so I’m hoping it’s not for me 😂. I’m curious what everyone’s experience has been.

@nickelouchbut it's all relative. A lower income family may feel that contributing 50 quid is spoiling them. Please don't assume that paying the full amount and not wanting your older kids in second hand clothes is spoiling them.

For my stepdaughters: their mid-20s as they both did long second degrees in other countries (medicine and veterinary), for which it was not possible to get student loans.

For my son: ages 3-5; he is autistic and we ran an ABA programme for years, the first two years of which we funded ourselves while we fought the Local Authority for funding.

I regret absolutely none of these costs, given the outcomes.

The amount of money the student gets in loans for Uni is based on parental income, because it is not expected that the student will be able to afford to pay for Uni by themselves.
This is a very old fashioned attitude.

I gave up my extremely well paid job to care for them then went back to working to then pay for them 😄. Don’t even want to add it up ! 😄 All totally worth it!

really helpful for you. I live in a small city and buses can’t get my kids to any activities and certainly we couldn’t visit grandparents etc who live rurally. It’s quite essential so if I was able to I would absolutely pay for my kids to have lessons/insurance etc as my parents did for me. I appreciate you might make a different decision if you live somewhere with excellent public transport.

In case anyone is interested, these are the student loan amounts 2026/2027.

DD’s dorm was over £8.500 and she would only be entitled to the minimum amount.

minimum £5,048 if household income above £70k
max £10,830 if household income below £25k

For us the most expensive time was private secondary school years, followed by uni. We had the luxury of grandparent care and flexible working, so our nursery costs were minimal.

Genuine question, with the introducton of the 30 'free' hours (I know not really free), have nursery costs not significantly reduced for most people now?

Genuine question, with the introducton of the 30 'free' hours (I know not really free), have nursery costs not significantly reduced for most people now?

I was thinking this too. When mine were little nursery costs in London were eye-watering and it was much cheaper for me to hire a nanny. Surely the government funded hours have reduced the costs now?

@Beachforever@dontmalbeconme it definitely reduced our bills (also was in London at the time) but not as much as you’d think. There’s still a lot of hidden costs around it, you don’t usually just get given 30 free hours, you usually have a certain amount of sessions and have to pay the wraparound fees. There can also then be food costs. Essentially providers say they don’t get enough funding and they’ve found a surprising amount of loopholes to add charges. Fees also massively went up towards the end of our childcare years when national minimum wage kept going up. My SIL is paying far more now than we did per day.

But yes it definitely helps.

It certainly depends. I’m charged £1.50 a hour for consumables when accessing the free hours.

then £8 a hour when not using the free hours.

so it’s £45 a week for the 30 hours funding. that was the cheapest we could find. One nursery charged £6 a day to watch our baby eat the food we provided.

one nursery we looked at only allowed funded hours 1-6pm. No good when I needed 8am-2pm.

I have one child (DS14) as planned.

Never paid for childcare so the most expensive time is right now. He’s expensive but I knew he would be!

If he decides to go to uni, then that will be the most expensive time, because then we’ll be funding that in its entirety, we’ve saved to be able to do so for a long time. I don’t want him to have any student debt when he doesn’t need to.

Parents have always been expected to support their children at University, grants were means tested and parents made up the shortfall when I went to University in the late 80s/early 90s.

It was a lot cheaper to be at university in the 90's than it is now. The shortfall parents were making up then doesn't come close to the expectations now. I was at university 1999-2002.

Yes I didn’t qualify for a grant so my parents supported me though I had to be very careful with money. I could not have managed without their financial support. It benefited me with my career and I really appreciated it. That was mid 90s. Will do same for my kids. Enough for basic living but they can work if they want more.

One of DDs friend's first year university accomodation costs £300 a week in London. She will be on minimum loan so her parents are paying all of that. We're paying half of that for DD in a cheap city in the north so it really varies.

I costed it up and University costs look like they will be similar to nursery cost for us but we work FT now and £500pcm is worth less than it was 15 years ago. You'll probably have to pay similar to your nursery fees by the time your LO is at Uni.

It would have been nursery for us but we’ve started private school for my eldest so that is a level up in costs. Without fees I think age 11-13 would actually be the cheapest because childcare costs drop and they haven’t hit driving lessons.

My year 2 child is getting free lunches still, has quite a lot of hand me downs so on the face of it is still quite cheap but activities are ramping up and childcare is still quite chunky.

Annual costs:
full time wrap around- £3.5k
holiday care - £1.5k
activities - £3k

chunky but cheaper thanthe nursery fees We were paying.

Well we won't be paying. They'll have to work like I did. I guess they could have their house deposit instead but seems a little silly to waste it like that when houses are so expensive these days.

The costs people are posting here are very similar to what I paid (in relative terms) at uni and I coped. It wasn't fun, but not much choice.

Did you also leave university with debt so sizeable that you had no hope of clearing throughout the entirety of your career meaning that you effectively pay an additional 9% tax per year until you retire?

I didn’t have parental financial assistance in university, and worked alongside my studies. But that was before £10k pa tuition fees, extortionate rents and student loans that use loan shark tactics.

For us, it was teenage/uni years. But we didn't use any paid childcare when they were little, so that makes a huge difference - they just did the free 3 hours a day term time that was available back then. We just worked around the kids, so saved a lot. But if you are working full time, with full time nursery costs, then I don't think they will ever cost you more than that.

Well we won't be paying

The loan is based on your household income, because the government (rightly or wrongly) expects parents to top up the maintenance loan. Most likely your kids will have to get a part-time job as well, but this can be very difficult, in a city full of students.

My DD is very lucky to work at a coffee shop when she comes home for the holidays, she worked there full time for a year before going to uni, so saved some money, and the boss really likes here and will give her shifts when she is home.

But it's hard, and very expensive, for students. If you can't/won't top up their maintenance loan, you are putting them at a real disadvantage, and I don't know any parents who want that for their kids.

They were quite cheap to run until they reached late teens! I would say that they cost us the most when they were aged between 18 and 40.

You could get no grant at all in the early 90s if your parents were on a high income but now the 'worst case' is half a loan. I did find a chart somewhere that showed the amount parents have been expected to contribute has remained roughly equivalent in real terms, can't remember where sadly. The trouble is the cost of housing in some areas which means parents end up paying more than the government calculates. In the late 80s students stopped getting housing benefit but I think that was balanced by the drop in housing costs during the 90s but now housing costs have increased again. So parents are paying a fortune for their kids at university but the money is going straight to the landlords. If all your children went to the same city for university it might be worth buying a flat for them to avoid throwing away such large amounts on rent but if would depend on the city, how many children and how long they lived there, so difficult to predict in advance.

Even without extra loans two of ours were in debt to the tune of nearly £50k just for tuition fees and a small loan after three and four years ..so we were giving them money for food and wash items , some clothes etc most months.

Why would I have my son get himself into debt when his dad and I have been saving for it for almost 2 decades?

Min maintenance loan is about 4.5-4.9k....that doesnt cover rent in most places....and then they need money to live on

DD has a job (after applying for 60-70) its zero hours which means its impossible to budget... sometimes she only works 4 hrs/fornight