How much do you give your uni offspring a month?

[fedup21]

Looks like we will only be entitled to the minimum rate of maintenance loan so will have to top it up quite a bit.

His top choice is Birmingham and it’s looking to be between £3/4K for the first year in halls (without meal plan) or £5/7k (with Meal plan) which is the maintenance loan, but how much would they need on top of that?!

£200 a month? £400 a month?

Once DD has paid her rent she had £70 per week left in the Autumn term (slightly helped by the term ending after 8 weeks due to strikes!), and she has almost double that per week to live on this term.
When she's home she gets her usual pocket money amount just to help a little.

Then she let me know that she tries to stay below £30 a week term time, and tends to manage quite well, so she should have some savings by the summer! Handy as she's not chosen to get a term time job. She does have a small pt job for in the holidays, but it's not a certain amount of hours.

I pay their rent and £100 per week to live on. Also pay phone, car insurance, flights etc. They work during the long holidays but not during term time.

DS1 is in caitered halls which includes all meals except midweek lunches. On top he gets £100 per week, plus we paid for all his clubs (about £700 including gym membership), we pay for his incredibly expensive books, we pay his train tickets when he comes home and we are paying for his ski trip as he isn't coming with the family at half term. But he is still having to use some of his gap year savings to subsidise his social life, ticketed events are very expensive. He has quite a few school friends at the same uni and his allowance is average for the group.

One of my children was totally useless with money. So he chose to pay his money into my account, then I paid his accommodation. The remainder ( plus our contribution) was divided up by the number of weeks. Then that amount was paid into his account every Monday morning.

He got a bank account with no overdraft so he couldn’t spend more than he had. And even if he spent it all on Monday ( quite hard to do ) he just had to get through the rest of the week. He always had enough store cupboard food so he wouldn’t starve and he didn’t need to pay for travel.

It was much easier for him to look at his phone and see how much he has left for that week than work out every single day to see if he was over spending. As a PP said, many adults struggle with making their pay check last for the month so it’s not surprising that so many 18 year old can’t make it last for months.

I know this is the kind of arrangement that gives most MNers apoplexy - especially the ones whose children had their own cheque account at 5 and went to boarding school at 10. However it worked for him and gave him one less thing to worry about ( he has some additional needs which make organisation particularly difficult).

But any other student could do the same by putting their loan into another account - some savings accounts allow standing orders I think.

DD is in halls with no meals. The student loan exactly covers rent. I give her £50 per week for food. She got a summer and Xmas job to pay anything extra.

The loan gets paid per term, not all at once at the beginning of the year.

I know Gin, but how many adults, who are used to shopping and paying bills, would cope with all their money for 4 months dropping into their account in September, and not getting any more until well into January ?
I sent my ds money on Sunday. He has always been a spender and I knew I wouldn't have let him go without food for two months if he got it wrong early in the term. By the money arriving weekly he would only ever have to 'last' 6 days if it all went wrong.
My dd has always been better with money and I happily set her up with monthly money. So, to some extent, it does depend on their character a bit, but I think it puts them under a lot of pressure to get 4 months money in one go for their first time living away.

It didn't occur to me that my dc wouldn't be able to work out they needed to budget over the term. They all just did. I get that some dc may not be able to but generally I saw it as good for them to learn to budget.
It would concern me paying weekly wouldn't prepare them for working life, but if it is what works for individuals that's good.

We went monthly as a middle ground - requires some budgeting/planning, but is a fixed period that isn't too long.

Termly - especially if you're letting them use the maintainance loan - felt a little too inconsistent for us. Not only is each term a different length, with different study/break periods, but the loan amounts vary and don't really match based on the number of weeks. I'd find it a PITA let alone someone new to it :P

Weekly has worked for my 5 and my sons who ar currently at university have no overdraft facility on their accounts (deliberately). They do seem to find it easier to track mnoey on banking apps than my older children did 10 years before when banking was not as easy.

We paid ds basic accommodation costs and he lived off maintenance loan.

At the moment dd is in accommodation I pay for with breakfast and evening meals provided so I give her £35 per week.

However next year when she moves into a shared house I will be ensuring she has access to the maximum amount for student living away from home outside London.

She does at the moment have a part time job on a Saturday coaching at a children's activity but it's only 36 weeks a year and is it tough. She has to take several Saturday a year off because of the demands of her course.

She is doing a performing arts course. Her day starts at 8.30am and ends at 6pm. Total weekly contact hours are approx 30-35 hours per week. At certain times of the year she has to attend on Saturdays or until 7pm at night. Then there is private study.

Their rent is paid for them plus £400 a month.

Dd gets about £75pw. Last term (third year medic) was 16 weeks, and she will only get 2 weeks off at easter and none this summer. She is on a six month placement, with quite a few early starts, and which can be physically and emotionally exhausting. (She loves it though) Some medics apparently do have jobs, but it is not easy. She has played sport instead..

She is frugal which helps, as does the fact that she still has savings from her gap year, and is happy cooking from scratch. A two week cookery course in her gap year, though expensive, has proved a good investment. She rarely buys meat, but eats more healthily than her brother who again did not spend much but seems to have lived entirely off pot noodles in his first year.

The money she has, including gap year savings, has been enough to replace her laptop to one which allows her to annotate diagrams easily, and to buy a cheap (Chinese spy) phone, plus pay for petrol.

To be honest her non medic brother probably worked harder, as he has ambitions to be an academic or similar. Luckily he picked some summer research assistant work at the end of his first year and a two month paid internship at the end of his second. He could not have had a job during term time and have worked as hard as he did. Again he managed fine on £75 pw and was probably able to save.

Seems that the general consensus is that if you top up to the maximum loan (which is what I think you are supposed to do), they can manage as long as they do not live somewhere with really high accommodation costs.

Next year minimum loan = £4,289, maximum loan = £9,203, difference = £4,914. So it looks like if your family income is over £62k, you should expect your child to need a £5k pa subsidy, which is roughly equal to accommodation costs at lots of places.

I was shocked by how fast the taper was - you are expected to give 13% of any income over £25k to your DC - if you are paying 20% tax, 10% NI, potentially 9% for your own student loan, that is a big ask!

Althouh there is no legal obligation to give the teenager a penny but I agree it is steep. It is the price we pay for 50% not the 15% in my day who now go to university many in effect at tax payer expense.

On the calculator there is no difference if you have more than 1 child at university. In my day, they took account of affordability when my mum had 3 of us at university together. Most people will try to give their DCs what the majority have.

Make sure they get a job in the summer holidays- no tossing it off for 3 months. There is always temp work available.
This should help them fund themselves. Also encourage a part time job whilst they are there.

We pay DS's tuition, university housing and meal plan directly. He has a cash management account with a debit card at the same brokerage firm DH uses, so DH just tops up his account as needed. It's much more at the beginning of the term as he's buying course materials and paying the crew team fee. The rest of the time it's mostly delivery pizza and the odd trip into Boston to see the Red Sox play. Those months it's no more than $200 per month. He's majoring in accounting and is very frugal. There are times when we wish he was spending more to go out and socialize tbh.

He's not thrilled that DH can see the charges to his debit card (their accounts are linked) but since DH can keep an eye on it he never has to ask for more.

We top dds loan up to the full loan. Although her term is technically 8 weeks long, with meetings and supervisions outside that, she ends up with more of a 10 week term. She does a little work at Christmas and Easter, but had an internship all through the summer and does this summer too.

She is saving some, that will be really helpful for anticipated post grad studies.

My DD advises not to go for catered accommodation. Many of her friends are currently at uni and hate the lack of freedom in terms
Of what they can eat and when, they hate getting up early to have breakfast after a night out especially. They therefore end up spending extra money on the food they do want to eat as well as paying for the catering.
DD is in self catering halls and we give her £55 a week which she says is more than enough, she has even suggested we reduce it to £45 next term which is great! Some in her flat get much more £75/100 pw and others the same.
DD also works for the SU to find social activities, clothes etc and will work during the summer to build up some savings for next year.

DD has funded herself - working in holidays and saving. Is at a RG uni, not particularly low number of contact hours and is on line for a first. Cannot believe how much money a lot of her fellow students have been given and how much they spend! Real life for most people is about budgeting and working - I'm not understanding all these 20 year olds who don't have time to work!

@captainoftheshipwreck people are generally just talking about topping up to the amount students get if their home income is low. Maybe your DD got the full loan - would be very difficult to manage on the £4k students from higher income families get, even if they work.

The relevant question here is how much do they need to live on in total from loans, grants, bursaries, work and family support and it seems like the £9.2k full loan for students outside London is about right unless you are in an expensive part of the UK.

I give nothing as oldest daughter gets maximum student finance, she also manages a part time job. She runs her own car, pays for her own mobile phone and saves every month

Agree with paying for accommodation and leaving the minimum loan to live off. Easiest way to teach them to manage money, and also agree with pp to avoid paying for catered halls, as it's possible to feed yourself for considerably less then the premium it adds on and teaches to budget food expenditure and to cook meals.

I would be concerned that if loan is used for halls and you pay your DC directly then it will always be a case of needing more money for something, whereas if accomodation is covered the minimum maintance is easily livable for daily living expenses and leaves money for socialising if budgeted correctly!