WWBU to purchase DD expensive university accommodation?

[ThreePounds]

This isn't some twisted bragging thread, BTW. We have been saving since she was born.

She will be going to London in September for university and we are pretty set on a lovely studio apartment that's in student accommodation. It's just over £400 a week. We can afford this.

My mum thinks it's a bad idea. I never went to uni, so I'm not sure what experience she has, hence I'm asking here. She thinks she needs to 'learn' that's it's not easy or necessarily 'nice' to live alone, etc. etc.

DD has a part-time job herself and isn't expecting at all.

WWBU?

I think she will miss out on a lot by not sharing, and potentially find herself very isolated. A big part of the uni experience is learning to live with everyone in halls.

If you can afford 1.6k a month rent and have a deposit for her first home, can you afford to buy something now in your name and sell when she graduates?

At least you would get something back and may even make a profit.

Went straight into a flat at uni as opposed to spending a year in halls and wish I hadn't.

@rubybleu there are lots of other room types but just on different floors

I went

I'm not in London so this seems eye-watering expensive to me, but I think you are being a lovely and caring parent.

If this works for you, and your daughter, then go for it!

If I were you, if she can get a place in Halls for the first year, she should do that

and then give her the flat for 2nd and 3rd years.

A lot of friendships are made in Halls/sharing residences during the first year - especially in London which because it isn't a campus university means that students have less of a cohesive social life. Everyone I know who wasn't in Halls/University accomodation in the first year in London really regrets it.

It's a lonely time going to University first off and can be a bit of a culture shock. I would worry that she will be isolated living alone in the first year.

Don't do it first year. Do it second year. Or buy now and let it out for first year to someone else

Your mother is entitled to her opinion but this is not her decision. The only thing I'd say is that the first term can be very lonely as you are settling in and making friendships and shared facilities mean that you have someone to talk to. I'm still in touch with my next room neighbour from uni and it's thirty years since we left.

I think she needs to share/be in halls for the first year. The studio apartment sounds great for the second year, but before she's made friends and got her feet on the ground it may be very isolating. London is a great place for Uni but because everyone lives so far apart from each other when they live out, it can be hard to get a social life going - it's very unlike provincial cities where there's less geographic distance and/or an area student housing tends to be in. So I'm afraid I'm sort of with your mum on this, at least for first year.

£1600 for a student studio is eyewatering even for London.

My last 2 bed 2 bath flat was about £1500 & that was split 2 ways.

Its a waste of money imo but its yours ro waste.

Honestly it's so important that she shares communal space or she'll find it really really hard to fit in and make friends. I

That flat of mine was zone 2 north London too.

It's entirely up to you and your mother has nothing to do with it. Would she have her down the mines before lectures too, perhaps?

Realistically, learning to share a kitchen and toilet with six perfect strangers is NOT a life skill many of will need to learn. DH ended up just not using his flat after one of his flatmates basically started urinating all over the bathroom floor. Nothing would make him stop. It was only when he sub-let the floor of his bedroom to four other guys (he wasn't Irish and couldn't see the difficulty with this) who ALSO urinated all over the bathroom floor and spent the day in the kitchen drinking tea and boiling infinite eggs (all 5 of them), that the uni threw him out. I don't think this had any "character-building" impact on DH, so much as just pissing him off.

Equally, my uni housesharing experience mostly just taught me that girls can be utterly FILTHY and boys are surprisingly much cleaner. They never turned the immersion off either (the awful girls, I mean).

Your lucky lucky daughter, not having all this ahead of her!

Your mum is being silly. Wonder if your mum would like to live in the student accommodation I lived in. Broken oven. Broken freezer. Mattress from 1950s (I was at uni in 2000). Filthy old mouldy shower and one toilet shared between 12. Washing machines 3 between 100 people. Any food in fridge/cupboards stolen. Walls between rooms = makeshift plywood not covering the full gap. Room=smaller than legal size for a prison cell. The year after I left, someone important got wind of just how shitty this block was and it was demolished. I was sent a begging letter for money to build a new one

Don't think your mum knows what she's talking about. Perhaps she'd prefer your dd to live in a tent in the park and eat from bins.

My ideal would be student halls for year 1 then private shared accommodation for subsequent years. I'd have had no social life at all if I had been living in my own place from the outset.

Rule of thumb- the more expensive, the more isolated and full of postgraduate and non partying students. Mine have all gone for scruffy, shared facilities and made loads of friends. Even the pods with 4 rooms/ shared facilities lend themselves to isolating- there are posts everybody autumn term on here from parents and parents of friends worrying about depressed students not coming out of their rooms. Put her somewhere sociable and promise her she can have a studio next year she won't, she'll want to be in a grotty house share with the friends she makes this year.

Agree about the cultural aspect - in halls, she's get her own room but also the chance to mix and meet with a lot of other people from other courses as well as her own.

The other thing she would need to be aware of is to choose her friends carefully. If she has such a nice place to live, it could be that friends living in halls/grottier flats always want to be round at hers, whether it's for a few drinks, a Netflix night, or very loud parties that get out of hand.

I think she'll struggle to make friends without living in halls, and I say that as someone who loathed living in halls. I'm still glad I did it though as I made lifelong friends and great memories, and those are what stuck.

It is a good idea if she finds other ways of making friends other than going out partying- ie she's going to join societies etc. Halls helps with the friendship aspect massively and it will make things more isolating if she doesn't try in other social circles.

When my daughter first went to Uni we thought she would like it better in one of the bigger rooms with an ensuite and fewer rooms per corridor.. She HATED it! Because the rooms were more expensive, the other students in her corridor tended to be older, post grad, very quiet , and hardly came out of their rooms, so there was no socialising. She wanted to change to be in one of the cheaper rooms where everyone else was so that she could join in the fun of student life.

I think she will miss out by not being in halls for the first year - just apply for the nicest halls if it's not too late. You can make lifelong friends and find someone to share with from 2nd year and possibly post-grad / working.

I am at uni and live in a studio flat at the minute, I did spend the first year in shared accomodation because everyone told me not to miss out on sharing and how it was fun etc. But it was just awful, I worked and my flat mates didn't respect that, they were messy and loud and it was an awful experience that meant I struggled with my uni work. I'm so much happier living alone now.

If you can afford to help her, do it!

@FreeNiki I don't see it as a waste. It's basically brand new inside and lovely. I think you get what you pay for really.

It may have less 'partying' students, but she couldn't think of anything worse. She's not shy, but she isn't the type who is into that, never has been.

It does worry me she won't have flat mates but she says she isn't worried at all as she will make new friends at her job and uni, she also has a very good friend doing the same course as her.

It does sound like a very lonely student experience to me.