How do people afford private school?

[PopGoesTheWeaselYetAgain]

Following on from discussion House of Commons today, how do people afford private school fees? Is it by sacrificing holidays and other luxuries? That wouldn't by you a year, but did she perhaps mean a term? How do you pay for the other two terms?

I'd appreciate it if posters refrained from speculation. I'm interested in people's actual financial circumstances and decisions.

SIL earns variable amounts between 200K and 3M a year.
two kiddos's in private school.

Most prep schools have a Grandparents day, there is a reason for that! We were friendly with the old head of our son’s prep school and he said well over 50% of pupils were at least part paid by Grandparents. It is an extremely tax efficient way of passing over inheritance.

We got a bursary (one term's fees) and scholarships (worth around £5K) to Brighton College. It still cost us around £12K each year, but my parents paid around £5K plus our DD's godfather paid £2K and we paid what we could squeeze out and took on a little debt for the rest. It was basically a family affair. If we had had a second child she wouldn't have gone I don't think. She did v well and is now at uni. Tbh, she probably would be in a similar position now had she gone to the local sixth form, but our local seniors is grim so she'd have had to have travelled quite a way to a decent state seniors whereas Brighton College is only ten minutes away. I have no regrets, but it certainly left us pretty skint.

We both work full time and earn fairly well. All our financial decisions since we decided to have children have been made to accommodate the fees. We live in a small house, holiday mostly in the UK and don’t spend much on ourselves. We also stopped at 2 children because we knew we couldn’t afford fees for 3.

This is quite common at the school our children attend. It’s used as a way of handing down money without the tax man getting their paws on it.

high earners

We earn around $260k/year, mortgage and tax $3k/month. Income tax is around $35k for the year. There’s a lot left over 🤷‍♀️. We also only have one DC and don’t have extravagant tastes, so while we might spend $10k on a holiday, we have only one 6 year old car we bought secondhand, I’m sitting on our 10 year old sofa we got on sale etc.

Oh and DC’s school is currently $24k but will go up to $35-40k once she starts primary.

Two very average salaries, bought the smallest house we could manage with, no new kitchen, bathroom etc. We have no holidays, don’t drink (it’s expensive), our entertainment and social lives are based around volunteering. We have 2 DC at a very reasonably priced private school for secondary, one funded by EHCP, the other we have had to fund as a large state secondary environment was awful for his mental health. We have to watch money carefully.

I earn £88k. Clear about £4600 per month after pension. I pay £600 towards mortgage (DH pays the rest) and £1600 per month for my youngest DC who is in private school. Leaves me with around £2400 which I save, use for holidays or other luxuries or items in the house (e.g. decoration, new furniture etc). DH pays all other bills. Luckily my oldest is at state grammer otherwise it would be a lot tighter.

And when both DC’s first started at prep I paid for both out of my salary of £50k. Was £2k per month which left me with about £1k.

As pp have said it’s because people have a lot of money or access to it via family… DS was at a private school for a while and for us it wasn’t a massive stretch although would have potentially been in the longer term. DH works in finance and I am self employed in an area of management consultancy.

We were definitely the lower end of income/ size of house/ extravagance of holidays. Lots of people with income of 7 figures, houses well over £2m, lots of holidays to Maldives etc. And I’m sure some also had grandparents etc supplementing their fees.

there are plenty of people who have a lot of money… school fees of £25k really are a drop in the ocean for some and probably do cost less than their family holiday!

They'll all say they make sacrifices. They don't; they make choices.

And most of the private families I know don't seem to do that either - still have wonderful holidays and nice cars and live in nice places (sometimes two places!).

Oh yes military - our local private has lots of naval families. One of whom I know has never worked beyond the wire of the local base. i don't understand why we as tax payers are paying for this. But that's how some naval officers can afford it - we pay!

I have 2 kids in private school, so obviously all the families I know are also educating privately.

I don’t know many people who pay from inheritances etc. Most people just have really, really well paying jobs.

Don’t listen to the tory BS about people ‘making sacrifices’ to send their kids. Fees in London are around £20k a year, with 2 kids that’s £40k and you pay that out your net income so need to have a salary of £80k to pay tax and then have £40k left over. That’s a lot of holidays to sacrifice 😂

No you need to be on at least i’d say £150k to pay fees and also mortgage, bills etc. But a lot of people are.

We're planning to send DS next year for P6 then DD will follow 5 years later for S1. Both in state primary now so we obvs have 'saved' that way.
Things that make this (hopefully) possible:

• We both work full time. Combined earnings between £160k and £180k year
• I'm in Scotland where fees are lower than London.
• Although we are looking at 11 years of fees (from DS starting to DD finishing), kids will only be there at the same time for 3 of those years.
• We have just remortgaged (at 4%) and took out a chunk of money to help for those 3 years ie to cover 1 kids fees for 3 years. Because rates are high I'll earn a decent amount on that money until I need it.
• I've assumed 6% rise compounded and it'll be tight if it's higher. But I haven't assumed much rise in our salaries so hopefully that'll net it off to an extent.

No direct GP help but might be a back-up if all goes tits up.

To add to the below if it helps, we don't live lavish lifestyles but plan to continue holidaying abroad once a year (Eurocamp in France). We have one car and we won't need to move house in the future. We also live in quite a new house so can assume minimal maintenance. Rarely eat out and buy kids clothes from Vinted. Sending kids to private school won't hugely impact our existing lifestyle but we will need to retire later than we otherwise would.

Why is your income tax so low? Shouldn't you be paying 40-45%?

We live in Yorkshire and the DCs school costs around £15k per year, we only had 1 year where both of them were there.
I earn far more than that before we even take DH income into consideration
We have very little mortgage and no debt either so it’s easily doable for us

Is this to me? I never mentioned what we pay in tax. We pay the Scottish rate though which is higher than England so pay our dues!

DD1 starts private school nursery in September, DD2 will follow when she is old enough.
We will have 1 term per child per year paid for by FIL who does the same for all grandchildren, and the rest will be paid by the return on DH's family money we have invested. This is also the money we live off while DH runs his own property renovations company (small scale) and I don't work

@PopGoesTheWeaselYetAgain if you’re referring to Happy, I presume it’s because they aren’t based in the UK. Not every country has high income tax!

We pay out of income. I don't know what others do but there are plenty of high earning parents at her school - bankers, lawyers, doctors, etc. so I would expect them to be able to pay out of income. I'd say they are older than average parents so are probably fairly senior in their careers with pay reflecting that. Some might pay out of inheritance or with grandparent help but none have mentioned it.

Why is it a strange question? There are, of course, different answer. Let me put it another way. Will the 20% raise money for State education, or will it price people out?

I think to answer your question OP, look at the jobs of parents at your local
Private school. At ours we have a lot of doctors - consultants and GPs. We know a lot of doctors and all have used private education at at least some time if not for all their children all of the time.