How much do you give university students for food?

[VashtaNerada]

For those of you with DC living in university halls, how much money do you give them for food each week? Our eldest starts in September and is hoping to get a part-time job to supplement what we’re able to give her but I don’t really know how much is reasonable.

Nothing when Dd went. She had to support herself. If you must then £30 a week.

Just give them the expected parental contribution and they work it out for themselves. What grant has she got? For most people the parent contribution is around £400-600 a month.

Mine will live off the minimum loan after we cover her accommodation and has calculated she'll need around £30-35 a week for food

Thank you, this is helpful. To clarify, I’ve already worked out what I’ll need to pay for accommodation once I’ve taken off her student loan allowance. It’s just food / socialising etc I’m thinking about. I may well reduce it if she gets a part-time job but don’t want to start her off with less money than her peers if I can help it.

Just for food? Do you mean all food or just the weekly supermarket shop type food? DD typically spends about £30 a week at the supermarket (normally :Lidl) but she spends other money on takeaways/ eating out etc.

Mine gets £400 per month which I know is generous and is for all spends and socializing.

DD uses her loan to pay rent and we top up the shortfall and then give her £350 a month to live on (food, clothes, socialising, societies, travel). I think she spends around £30 a week on food.

Basically you give them what you can afford.

I just made sure that mine were topped up to the equivalent of the maximum loan. Then they continued to get the pocket money they already were getting £150 a month

Get her to work it out?

She can write up a meal plan for a week or 2....costs it out herself, and discusses with you.

It should not be a difficult task for her if she is grown up enough to take in uni debt and move out of home to study.

We fully fund DD so we pay for accomodation anyway and also all living costs.

DD gets £100/week. She saves around 20% to ensure she has money for clothes purchases, presents or days out.

Food shop is around £40-50/week and the rest is spend on socialising.

We do a click & collect on the day she moves in with staples like rice, pasta, herbs/spices, cooking essentials, cleaning supplies, drinks and fresh food for the first week.

We also pay for 1x train travel back home for Christmas and the Easter break.

None. We topped up the loan to the default parental contribution level, that’s it. She did they any extra.

Can she cook?

I do end of tenancies every year for uni students and I see how they live. If it were me, I'd do an actual food delivery every so often of whatever I could opposed to giving them money for food. That way, they have stuff to eat they have to cook opposed to the crap they will go out and purchase. Stupid little cheese and spinach pastries for £8 in London.

We pay the accommodation costs (1k per month) and for her parking permit and she keeps her minimum maintenance loan to live on. Mil sends her £150 a month and she also works.
With our first dc we did it a different way, sent her £450 per month and she sent us the loan and we put it towards accommodation but it was just a bit faffy so we ended up just paying their rent and getting them to budget their loan accordingly.

DD will get minimum loan £5048 and that will be used for accommodation - another £1500 needs to be paid & we added extra into trust fund to cover this.

We plan to give £100/week & DD has savings from part time job.

My understanding is that the parents are expected to make up the difference between minimum loan of £5048 and maximum loan of £9790. So £100/week during term time seems reasonable. They can’t always find a part time job. It will be a commitment for us but I don’t think you can get much food for £30 when you consider breakfast, lunch & dinner. That’s before they buy bus pass/fares, toiletries, clothes.

It’s a pointless question as it depends on the amount of loan the student gets and the cost of accommodation.

However I wouldn’t expect my dc to live on £30 a week.

We pay their rent then the get the minimum maintenance elaod for everything else, top up with some part time work on the hols.

The OP is rather ambiguous in that it talks about "food" but most posters have talked about how much their DC need to live on i.e. not just basic food.

My DD could certainly survive on £30 a week just for food. But I'd expect a budget for a student to include "fun money" for more than just cooking basic food at home. So OP needs to clarify whether she's looking for a number of the "every day food" element of a budget or she's using food as a proxy for "everything that's not accommodation".

My mum gave me £20 a week back in the mid 90s. It wasn’t nearly enough!

Exactly the same. We are covering accommodation and then she will live off her minimum loan which over 40 weeks is over £125 a week. If she wants more she will work. We will continue to pay for her mobile phone, her contact lenses etc.

Thanks everyone - it does seem like it really varies! I suppose I can pick an amount to try and see how she gets on.

None. We paid rent and they lived off their maintenance loan.

We also paid the rent and dd lived of the minimum loan. I didn’t get into how much she needed for food, she had what she had. I kept paying her phone and she could walk to lectures and into the town.

A job! They need to work for basics like food.