People overestimate how much children cost on here?

[Bankin]

Yesterday found an old bank statement from 2019 and worked out after paying my rent I only had 400-500 a month to spend on everything else with one child.
No idea how I managed that but I did and now it has me wondering about all the threads where people say they can't afford kids because they'd only have a couple thousand left after the mortgage/rent? Am I unreasonable to think these people are being a bit dramatic?

Childcare bills have always been high. We had a net figure of well over £30,000 when they were young. Plus everyone online has their kids doing 7 days 24 hrs per day of life-affirming activities.🙄

@Gogogo12345 depends on when the birthday is, and that's assuming most people take 12 months mat leave (a lot don't is it's not usually covered by OMP). And obviously there are more costs than nursery 🙄 - my point was that alone makes it a serious financial decision.

I don't think the day to day costs are that much after they hit secondary.
It's childminder/nursery as the biggest direct costs, but also the indirect cost at the hit your career takes. Mine has never recovered. I'm earning much less now than before I got pregnant.

It's child care fees at the beginning that cost. Then you have a few years of breathing space where they are quite cheap to house. Then they hit their teens and clothes and tech costs a fortune. Then it's driving lessons and a car. Then it's university. And that's the basics. If you have dc that are into dance, football, rugby, riding it all costs extra.

Are you just making things up as you go along?
You went from 2k after rent to 1.5k after rent and childcare, that's quite a gap.
Are you aware that a full time childcare bill is about 1.5-2k per month per child?

For what it's worth our monthly budget after mortgage and childcare is about 1500 for a family of 4, and we are absolutely broke.
Food 500-700, energy 170, other bills 100, council tax 240, train commute 400: BOOM gone!

Our only luxury is weekend activities for the kids twice a month and a holiday once a year, and that's because we don't put anything into savings.

But in reality it is a small fraction of time raising a child.Thats the point. And if you are coughing up £2.5 k a month on nursery fees for 2 kids then must be a high earning family to start with . Many people's wages are lower than that. And if wages are low there s help towards childcare as well as the " free hours"

Are childminder still cheaper than nursery? My eldest was at nursery but sevknd had a childminder. The same childminder who did after school care for eldest ( not nursery age together)

Not making anything Up there's a multitude of threads where people claim to be broke with 2k, 1.5k leftover etc. I'm not talking about just one thread.

I'm just saying I don't get it because I had 400-500 left over after rent from 2019-2022 and still survived with one child. Like 2k or 1.5k is still a lot more than 400-500

I agree to an extent.

I have four children and between boyfriend and I we earn around £40k a year.

Childcare isn't something I've had to pay out for as I work for myself so do it around the children. We don't go on holidays abroad or have an extravagant lifestyle but we manage.

My eldest is almost 14 and its a little more expensive for him now because he goes out with his friends, needs adult sized clothes and footwear etc.

Tight sometimes? Absolutely. But more than manageable.

i mean, personally i don't think it's explained enough! but there are many factors that determine how much a child will cost their parents.

Childcare fees alone i pay £1200 a month. Then add in the increased shopping bill, water / utility use, new clothes/shoes. Childcare and rent alone take up pretty much 85% of my pay!

Obviously people with £1000s left over after bills aren't struggling but they will still have been hit by increases in all of those ways reducing their disposable income.

It also depends on the standard of living you as an individual deem acceptable.

There is paying the basics and then there is personal choice with the surplus. What’s acceptable varies.

To have children requires financial sacrifice, you will always be financially better off not having children. Some don’t want to sacrifice what they like doing for children.

I think if you didn't need childcare it's really quite a different situation.

Realistically, when people say they can't afford a child they mean they wouldn't want to live in those financial circumstances. We could and would cope if I found myself pregnant with a third child tomorrow, but we've chosen not to have one in part because we don't want either us or our existing children to be as financially constrained as we would be with three. I don't think people mean 'we would starve to death' when they say they can't afford it, nor do I think that's the right metric to be using.

Also, was it you and one child living off that or two adults and a child? That makes a huge difference in some bills, e.g. food, transport, clothing.

I was wondering this also. If it was really that expensive to have kids, nobody would have them. My youngest is 9 now and I recall paying something like £800 a month for a childminder once the free hours were introduced. It was a lot at the time but was only temporary. With 2 working parents, we could just about manage. We are much better off now not paying any childcare costs.

We did stop at 2 kids though as we weren't prepared to take that initial financial hit again. It was pretty soul destroying to see my wages come in each month and majority of it go back out again to the childminder! I'm not saying it stops being expensive after they start school because you know, uniform, school trips, bday Xmas etc but it isn't half as bad as people make out. It is just the initial first few years that cost the most. With careful saving for that in mind, it's doable.

Childcare and housing costs (adjusted for where you live). Latter is the main reason one in five children live in poverty in England.

Everything else is peripheral.
Until a brave government stands up to landlords and overseas investors, nothing will change.
(Most landlords don’t have a mortgage to service so they cant use lender interest rates as the reason for hiking up rents ‘cause it’s market rate’).

Now this is the first good point I've seen someone make it was just me and one child at the time now I'm married and this man eats SO DAMN MUCH haha.

That aside though I was still shocked to find that old statement and see how little I had left after paying the rent

Where are all the nurseries that are 1.5k-2k per month full time?! Must all be in London. I'm in an expensive South coast seaside area and our fantastic nursery that I've put 2 children through previously is only £1100 per month full time and that's BEFORE tax free childcare is used to pay for it (giving a saving) and before free hours kick in.

My son does 3 full days and is now 3 so it will shortly be going down to around £120 per month for us.

I think all the londoners need to pipe down on this thread - you pay more for childcare but will earn a lot more so its relative if you don't earn more than most you should move out of London anyway

Genuine question, how did you manage to end up in a situation where you were working but didn't need childcare? Did you bring your child to work? Work from home when they were asleep in bed? Or do you mean you had family/friends who could provide free childcare so you didn't need to pay for it?

Perhaps some people want to give their children more than the bare minimum, have other commitments you don't have or just don't have £400-£500 after rent.

Yep. It's childcare.

£2k per month per child for the nursery we use.

@User67556 - but I think the posts OP are referring to are mostly Londoners anyway, so it IS relevant. Not just london either, I'm in the Home Counties (in a commuter town to be fair) and my local nursery is £2.2k after funded hours. It's insane, and anyone would be insane to start a family without considering this.

I agree to an extent. I think I am someone that lives within my means, when we had children in nursery (both at the same time) my work barely covered that bill but we made it work. We must have just cut down on other spends.

However I do think the cost of everything else has increased much more than wages have, so that it is actually day to day life that is the biggest cost e.g. gas, electric, council tax, food

I agree that there are some ridiculous ones where they can’t afford children with £1.5k left after all bills, food and childcare. But on the other hand £400 would be completely unrealistic in 2025. It also comes down to what kind of lifestyle you want your children to have and what your views on providing for their futures are. Personally, I wouldn’t have had children and would have said I couldn’t afford them if I couldn’t have afforded more than the absolute basics and given them experiences such as family days out, trips to other cities and holidays, or if I couldn’t afford to save towards their futures including further education and house deposits, but that’s just my opinion and wants for my family and not everyone has the same priorities.

To be fair even if you’re saying 1.5k left after mortgage, that’s still not much when you consider everything else needing to be paid, including food shopping.

Excluding mortgage our other household/personal bills come to around £900, that doesn’t include food/house/toiletries shopping, petrol or any savings.

So actually that’s only £600 a month. We don’t eat crazy expensive food or shop at crazily expensive shops, we shop at one of the cheapest supermarkets, and our shopping is always at least £100 a week. So now that’s only £200 left.

Petrol, probably could get it down to £100 if we only ever drove to and from our workplaces, so that’s £100 left. If we had a dentist appointment, a prescription to pay for, any kind of unexpected bill, that £100 disappears.

Now as we wouldn’t be putting any money away in savings and a car breaks down, we’re really fucked. Or if it’s MOT/service month. And these figures are with no car finance payments, so if you had a car on finance that’s an extra cost to add to the bills on top of whats already there.

We don’t live in an expensive part of the country and we don’t live extravagant lifestyles but if we only had 1.5k left after paying just our mortgage we wouldn’t have been able to afford kids.

I was a student in 2019 then when Covid happened I could not find a job till things started opening up in 2022.
Not everyone does expensive nursery though surely it's cheaper to live off your partner's wage till they get free nursery hours. I get that this is a blow to womens independence though and has it's own issues.

If you were a student were you exempt council tax?
I don’t see how you could do it- my council tax and energy bills are £400 a month. That’s before other essential bills like water, broadband etc- before anyone has eaten a thing.