...to want a say in how much we give step children for uni?

[GinnyMcGinFace]

My husband and I have been together for ten years and have two sons. He also has two children from his previous marriage. His ex wife clearly hired a highwayman for a divorce lawyer because we have paid, religiously, £1200 a month for the children, plus half of uniforms, school trips etc. for years. She also got £250k in cash from the divorce and he got to keep the dog. Anyway, whilst the divorce agreement appears ridiculous to me, it was signed, sealed and delivered before I was on the scene so I've never really said much about it. However, the agreement is clear that it covers only until the children are 18-step daughter is now 20 and step son is 18. Both want to go to uni this year and have asked us-well, their dad actually-for financial support. He said of course we will support them, but it's a conversation we need to have altogether. His ex wife has lost her shit and says it's nothing to do with me and they aren't my children so I shouldn't be involved in what she called 'negotatiations'. I feel-as does my husband to be fair to him-that as this now sits outside of their maintenance agreement, the request is coming from our joint income and therefore I should be involved in making the decision about how much we can afford. My husband has made the point that whatever we agree for the older children we have to be able to offer the younger ones and my step daughter (I suspect repeating her mother) has said that her and her 'full' brother-her words-should be the priority.

I've always got on well with my step children and they adore their little brothers. They have become typical teenagers in that they only get in touch with their dad nowadays when they want something but he is not always that great at calling/texting them either.

Is it my business? Am I just an evil step mother bitch??

I paid my own way through uni - but that was in the days of no tuition fees. As a low income family I also got a small grant in the first year and worked during hols to top up. However I think it's a different scenario these days.

Dh stops paying maintenance when dsd2 turns 18, but we've discussed with each other, and her, and said dh will continue to pay what he currently pays his ex but pay it directly to dsd instead. She's expected to get a job though and a loan for her tuition fees. Dh's money is towards living cost. This seems fair.

But absolutely it should be a joint discussion and decision with you involved op. For the record, I don't believe a parent's responsibility ends when a 'child' turns 18 but the child should have an increasing proportion of responsibility that lessens dependent upon their stage in life. I would not expect to still be financing a university graduate who has a full time job, for example.

I thought the 'full brother should get priority' thing was from the exw not the step daughter.

I think that attitude comes from the fact that the dad was already committed to these two children before he had two more and the belief that he had no business having more dc if he couldn't meet his obligations to his first dc. Normally I have a lot of sympathy with that view but in this case it is very unfair because he has contributed a signficant amount financially to their upbringing and is willing to continue. There is a element here of the dc taking that totally for granted and all parents, biological or step have every right to object to being used as a cash machine!

YANBU. ExW has "lost her shit"? She needs to act like a grown up if she wishes to enter "negotiations" as she calls them.

I agree with all the PP who have said that discussions should be between DH and his children. ExW doesn't need to be involved at all at this point. Her children are grown up and perfectly capable (or should be) of drawing up a budget and discussing money with their father directly.

My brothers and I are second family for my dad so this kind of thing is very familiar to me! Ours is a very, very complex situation which would take forever to go into but I know he feels a lot of guilt about leaving my half siblings and this has led him to chuck money at them left right and centre over the years. My mum loves my dad's other kids but doesn't agree with this. Essentially, she feels that we (second family) had a mother and father to contribute 50/50 to our upbringing and uni fees etc. As did my half siblings. The problem lay where my dad's exW expected him to stump up 100% of these things for my half siblings, whilst also presumably giving them some of her own money (she had a very well paid job) meaning that my mum, to all intents and purposes, was contributing the same amount of her share of the household money to my half siblings as she was to her own children. I've explained that horrifically badly but I hope you can decipher it!

What I'm saying is, if your husband stumps up the full university fees for his older DC, this is actually unfair on the younger DC even if he does the same for them because they only have the two of you to help them whereas the older DC have their own mother as well.

I think that the comment is just an immature one from an 18 yo who probably does feel some resentment that she hasn't had her Dad living with her from the age of 8. She sees the newer family and maybe feels a bit jealous.

That's a natural reaction and is not the fault of sm, it has nothing to do with whether financial support is provided either.
It will be years before the younger brothers are in this position so I don't know how it can be known that the same won't be done for them.

My df remarried and I adore my much younger sisters but I do still now feel a pang of sadness that they are all together as a family and I didn't have that.

The main issue to me seems to be that the two children (adults) are waiting for their parents to do everything for them. Why are they not getting part time jobs and what has the 20 year old been doing for the last two years?

My dd is 17 and going to Uni next year. She will be eligible for the full loan but has been working every spare hour at weekends and in the school holidays to save up. She has done everything herself from applying for loans and uni to researching accommodation.

We will help her out, we will send her money or food deliveries but we don't have an awful lot of money and are struggling a bit ourselves but my god, at least I've raised a young adult who can stand on her own two feet and actually go out there and work for what she wants.

I'd be cringing if she was sat at home just asking for cash and wanting to negotiate how much she could get out of me.

The student finance section of the website for the preferred uni should be able to help you. I am quite new to this and have found it has helped to understand the realities for us as a family.

As I understand i; the DC have to complete their finance forms based on the household income of one of their parents. If they use the Mum it will be her total household income, so will include the income of any current partner she has. Similarly if they use your DH for their application, it will be your household income, including your salary that is considered.

At the salaries you have indicated, the DC will be able to access the full loan for tuition fees, but only the minimum for maintenance. We are in a similar situation; DD will receive a 3,750 maintenance loan, but the cheapest accommodation is 4,400 per year. Even with a part time job, we will need to top up her accommodation, and make a contribution towards her living expenses.

To answer your op no, I don't necessarily think you are being unreasonable, but you might find that your income is considered by student finance, because that's the way the system works.

I do think it is very unfair that step parents income is factored into the amount of support students can access from loans. A step parent has no legal obligation to financially support sc andmay well have their own dc to pay for.

Parents should be financially responsible for their own children.

£600 per month for uni is far too much - they will literally piss that up the wall.

They should be taking the loans available to them, which are ultimately paid back like an extra tax on future earnings, and then have a bit of a top up from parents (perhaps £200 per month) for living essentials, food etc.

When my children were at University much to my surprise my ex paid their lodging fees and I made a monthly allowance for food, so we knew they had a roof over their heads and something to eat; everything else they paid for, with part-time/holiday jobs and loans.
You (plural) offer what you can afford, based on four children, and they make up the rest.
I think it is best to pay directly for something specific, such as rent, fees etc, otherwise the money gets lost in the pot and they ask for more.

They need to get loans, they have been well supported through their childhood and are adults now.
I don't get this supporting children through uni, they need to learn to manage themselves.
there are loans and it is rare that a pt job doesn't fit into the spare time they have and their studies.
You have dependant children to account for, they should be the priority not the grown ups.
I don't think you should give them anything other than practical help like a huge hamper, maybe some new bedding, or something for their studies.

New, you are missing the point that the amount the dc can borrow is calculated on parental income - it's not so easy for parents to opt out of financial support with that being the case. Some students can find work but others can't. Courses really do vary.
I know with ds, he is turfed out of halls over Christmas, Easter and Summer. That makes it hard to get work and we live in a place where there isn't much holiday work going. So much depemds on individual circumstances.

New the maximum loans available are calculated after assumed parental support according to income.

Thank you so much for all the replies, I really do appreciate it.

I'll answer a couple of bits if that's ok. Firstly, my husband didn't cheat, ever. He's in the military and, by her own admission, she just couldn't cope with him being deployed. When he went to Iraq, she changed the locks in their house and told him it was over when they got back. She said she needed affection and a husband at home, daily. I can understand that (although it seems odd because he was in when he met her) He was devastated and agreed the settlement because, in his words, he didn't have the strength to fight and he wanted to do the right thing for the children. £600 each-which should, let's remember, be matched by their mother- IS a lot for maintenance when you consider that she also got their house, and written within the agreement was the need to provide half of all school uniforms, school trips, a foreign holiday per year and 'sundries'. However, much as I feel it's too high, it's not an opinion I've really voiced before because it was all agreed before I arrived.

I do think you're right about resentment but it's not that I resent the children, at all, but I DO resent this current behaviour. I suppose, as I said before, part of that is because I know deep down that we have probably caused it by always giving them lots of 'stuff'-iPads, phones, etc-and they can see we don't struggle for money (we aren't rich but it would be a lie to say we are poor), we have done a rubbish job of teaching them the value of money and that's going to be a difficult error to correct.

Thank you for taking time to reply everyone

I think it's important to treat the amount that you support the DSC the same as you are prepared and able to pay for your own DC , allowing for inflation.

They will get some loan, and should be expected to work part time and in the holidays. With a modest contribution from you, they should be able to get by just fine. There's no point making 18 year olds who are after all adults not needing to work at all themselves and continue living as a dependent child, especially when the majority of undergraduate courses are only about 12 hours of tuition a week. I worked both part term time and full time in the holidays and never hurt me.

The way that student loans are treated as a graduate tax these days, ie, if you don't earn more than a certain amount, you don't start paying it back, I don't think it's as bad as most types of debt.

If you are able to, I'd secretly squirrel away a bit more with the aim being to help them with house deposit further in the future, but don't tell them about it in case you need to dip into it for any reason.

As an aside, I hope you and DH are saving adequately for your retirements? iMHO that should be the first priority, don't bankrupt yourselves paying loads to support 4 kids through uni and end up impoverished in your old age because you didn't save for yourselves.

I wouldn't be having any 'negotiations' with them at all. They apply for uni, fill in all the forms and then if there is a shortfall they come with all of the figures and then the parents & step-parents offer the amount they are willing to pay. Then the adults who want to go to uni decide if they can afford it.

The 'full-brother' comment was in extremely bad taste and I hope her Dad pulled her up sharply on it.

Yanbu to want your dh to include you in his decision of how much to pay however
I think the important thing is to treat the step children as you will your own if they decide to go to uni.
Of course they can get loans but if there dad is in a postion to help them with uni fees etc then he should, but as his wife of ten years his ex should not exclude you from any talks about it.

No negotiations need to take place. "Children" will come with quotes for halls. Reasonable amount is added for food if not catered, a bit for bills. "Children" find out about loans. Need-Loan = parents' help. 1/2 of that by dad, the other 1/2 by mum. "Children" get jobs to pay for the luxuries.

Send this to mum. She'll shut up, she can no longer make him pay.

Mary I went in the early 90's and the main difference now is that the amount students can borrow, not get in grants is linked to parental income. When I went I could borrow the maximum amount regardless of my parent's income.

I appreciate that. In the 80s you couldn't borrow full stop though, whatever the parents income. If you couldn't get a grant (from the local authority, I think) because your parents were on a higher income you had no chance of going. Therefore students of higher earning parents were more dependent on them then than they are today.

I went to uni in the mid 00s as a mature (ish) student. My dad earns around 60k. I got bugger all! FWIW, my stepdad hasn't ever given me any money aside from the odd present here or there. What my mum has given me came from her own (limited) personal funds. So YANBU.

Why do these kids need so much cash anyway? Retail and catering jobs still exist, don't they? I thought living off beans on toast was part of the whole experience, character-building and all that. If anything, I'd be giving them tokens they can use for food and/or paying expenses like rent directly, not funding their socialising.

YANBU. Have they gone through UCAS and formally been offered places at university? Have the sorted their paperwork for tuition fee loans, maintenance loans, and accommodation? What will be their monthly incomings and outgoings? These are the things they need to present to you and your DH

Bang on. No blank cheques, you're not legally bound to fund this and as the dsm, you defo have a huge say in how your income should be spent. They can get jobs to help themselves, they may end up doing courses of 12 hours a week or so, no reason they shouldn't work. The average student now leaves uni owing £44000 according to Sky last week: I don't think it's for to ask you to fork that out twice.

^ agree with this. Theyvarenpreparing for adult hood, it makes better financial sense for them to borrow the money than you provide it.

They need to do their sums first before they come cap in hand. They also need to work out what they are going to do to contribute. Their mother had a quarter of a million quid, dare say she has some set aside for this.

That said, it's a poor lesson for them to learn that an adult will bail them out all the time.

Compounded with the issue of high student fees and the need for loans is the high cost of accommodation. Back in the late 80's/early 90's when I went, I lived in cheap, run down housing with no central heating. Ice on the inside of the single glazed Windows. A couple of places had coin meters so no money meant no electricity for lighting or cooking. If I wanted to heat the place, I needed to buy a fan heater. These days this would be illegal and rightly so but now it has gone the other way. And the luxury accommodation comes at a premium. I managed to get into halls (portacabins a since demolished) for 2 terms for around £16/18 per week. Second year, after spending a term in the coldest house ever with a coin meter, I moved to a place paying £22 per week shared with the owner and only had to heat the bedroom. The 2 bed house was almost double the first in my final year £240 PCM for the whole house (circa £30/wk) and I had the luxury of gas fires downstairs. That was as good as it gets and as it was in the north, winter was always coming. And accommodation costs stopped at the end of the Spring term and were often half price if not used in the 3 week Easter/Xmas holidays so never based on 39 weeks. I live in a university city and there are brand new halls ands ensuite student facilities everywhere and still more being built. I know people, who used to rent out HMO's to students at much cheaper rates but because the students don't want their places because they don't have ensuite bathrooms, some stand empty or have been sold off. And all this funded by the bank of mum and dad or student loans, which will some day need paying back. The level of entitlement on this point I find exasperating. Often students are living in far superior accommodation to the average working person, which sets false expectations up for of the sort of accommodation a person will accept to live in way past student years. The ensuing result as previous poster commented is that adult children in their 40's will be coming to their parents for financial bailouts from their pensioner parents.

Janecc
I had a house in a university town, and rented it out when I moved in with ExH

I initially thought I'd get students in, and was prepared to rent it out for 9 months and then put it on the market after they'd left for the summer, which I thought would be really appealing. Nope...
No dishwasher, only 1 bathroom plus one loo (3 bed house with a reception room that would have been the 4th bedroom), and I wasn't going to throw in Sky/Broadband/a cleaner as part of the rent
After the 4th or 5th student group came to see it and rejected it for the above reasons, I rented it to a group of working sharers, who apparently had no issue with any of the things that were dealbreakers for students.

sparechange lol. Upside down world. Ensuite facilities, dishwashers and cleaners are things to aspire to. I used the local call box but was allowed incoming calls at the house I shared with the landlord - the phone had a lock on it. And let me assure you, he didn't heat the house ever anyway - apart from one bar on his gas fire in his private living room. I once put the gas fire on in the kitchen with thick snow outside and he came in, turned it off and opened the outside door - I don't know why and assume we mere students weren't allowed heat. He came from Poland just after the war so I don't know if he had been in a Nazi prison camp. I thought I was in heaven when I rented a video recorder in my final year in the non centrally heated "lovely" 2 bed - well it was luxurious for me even with threadbare carpets and filthy curtains, which I washed and a couple shredded they were so old.

Are people just not reading the posts about how loans for children of higher income parents won't even cover the rent? And the explanations about how casual work is much harder to get these days?