If you're helping out your uni student kids financially, how much is it costing you per month?

[ToofFairy]

Trying to get a rough idea of how much it will cost to put the kids through uni. I don't expect they will get much more than the basic student loan. Not London prices.

@nearlyspringyay

I find these threads terrifying. I'm gently steering mine into modern day apprenticeships

This is why I always point out how expensive having teenagers and student aged DC are on parenting threads when posters ask whether they should have a third/fourth/even more children when their DC are all under the age of 10.

Minimum loan here. We paid rent and phone contracts. DS had a choral scholarship and did some refereeing to top up his loan and DD has £1000 per year uni scholarship and always seems to have plenty of money (cheap northern city).

Don't forget there are savings too

Reduced food bills
Reduced electricity bills
Reduced water
Possible cessation of extra curricular fees
Plus anything else you might have been paying for - travel cards, clothes, toiletries etc

Ds1 decided to stay at home and go local - although the course was the main reason - but finances and potential further covid restrictions played a big part. His university did not cover itself in glory during the first lockdown!

He gets basic maintenance loan of £3,400 pa which he uses for phone, fuel, car insurance on my car, entertainment etc

He works during university holidays but not term time.

We do not need to to top up him up at all but obviously he us still at home so we pay that way!

He's enjoying it. Has made friends, joined societies etc

Lots of his peers were desperately trying yo get out of their accommodation contracts last term.

When people say £x per week are you saying that’s for

Rent
Food
Entertainment
Travel
Lifestyle choices - phone/ contact lens

Or what?

I think we’ll end up paying for the rent, plus basic of £50 a week food money and top ups if needed plus she’ll work 6 hours a week. She has savings from working.

What we pay covers rent and leaves them about 500 a month
Also pay contact lenses, phones
Big shop at beginning of each term

Ds is commuting to uni so will have no rent, we will house/feed him etc. I have also committed to him I will pay car insurance for this /next year until we see how the land lies and he hopefully gets a couple of years no claims bonus.

He will apply for min student loan £4750.

Transport will be free first 3-4 years (Scotland) until he is 22.

From loan he can pay for his own clothing, petrol, books, laptop, phone, entertainment, football season ticket (£220), gym etc. I think that should be enough, if he needs more he will get a PT job.

It depends if they get the minimum or maximum loan. If they get the maximum eg 9500 a year outside London that is a totally different position than if they get £4500 minimum loan with the hope parents will make up the difference. In other words if your parents are not very well off you are in a very different and better off position from many students with parents who choose not to pay and yet the students is left with only the minimum loan.

@nearlyspringyay
Unfortunately only 3500 degree apprenticeships were awarded to 18 year olds last year. 272,500 accepted places at university. You can immediately see the problem. You might want a degree apprenticeship but getting one can be challenging and hugely competitive. The degrees might be from lesser universities and they might not compete with a degree holder from, say, Imperial for engineering on the career ladder. The apprentice route can be the slow route to professional qualification, eg in engineering. You have to weigh this up against earning money in the meantime.

Nobody will actually give you an official bottom line figure of what you should be paying towards your child's costs. And your own household outgoings aren't taken into account either, other than a small allowance for other dependent children. If you or anyone else reading this has the time and enough slack in the budget to put something away in advance, do that.
Teenagers can be expensive to clothe and house, so you may not really notice a huge difference in your disposable income once they're at uni.
For us, we give DD a few hundred a month, term time only. She gets more than the minimum loan, but our income is fractionally too high for her to qualify for any non-repayable bursaries.

It will be up to ds to decide his budget, I'm not going to allocate the money I give him to any particular purpose. We've started looking at costs and budgeting in a very outline way by looking at accommodation costs at the university he is aiming for, and looking at loan amounts. I've also said to him that if he's struggling financially to talk to me first, before taking on any more debt. Hope he does.

It's not just London that's expensive either. Place like Exeter, as just as expensive, and you don't get the uplift.

Min maintenance loan is used for rent, plus we have to top that up by £2.5k per year as halls are £165 per week. Additionally we give DD £500 per month allowance which covers all her food, travel, clothes, general day to day expenses. We cover her phone as well, and have paid for driving lessons.

We paid the rent for our 2 sons and they lived on their minimum loan for everything else.

Mine got £1000 a term ( London)

We pay his college bills, which cover food and all accommodation costs, and usually work out around 2k a term. We pay for his phone contract and contact lenses and he uses the family Netflix and Spotify accounts. We bought him a new laptop when he started. He cycles everywhere so no transport costs, and has the minimum loan for everything else. So probably the equivalent of paying the difference between the min/max loan. The terms are short and intense, and students at his university are officially not supposed to work in term-time. He works the college bar a few hours a week, and in non-term time tutors for an agency that pays well. He is definitely not frugal, goes out a lot, makes full use of his free overdraft, and has drawn very heavily on a cash gift we gave him for his 18th to fund travel and extras during his university years, such as the Varsity ski trip and college balls.

I do worry a bit that he's not great with money, but he's got years ahead of him to learn, and I'm just pleased he's having some fun despite the impact of the Covid situation the whole time he's been there.

My DS gets his maintenance loan of £4400 PA.
His accommodation is £5500 PA.

I pay his accommodation cost in full. He then has his maintenance loan to live on.
I pay for his phone, help out with shopping and send him funds for the odd treat.

I did the same for my DD.

DS has a part time job as a pizza chef. He uses this to pay for luxuries like holidays etc.

@whenindoubtgotothelibrary
£2000 a term for rent and food is pretty cheap. Lots of universities don’t have much accommodation priced under that. It used to be that minimum loan would pay for accommodation. It doesn’t now.

£400 a month plus pay for mobile phone contract (very cheap as family deal) and travel at start and end of each term.

Not including the summer holidays when DS works.

@user1487194234

We pay each of them £1100 a month

Christ, why do they need that much?! A lot of families with 4 mouths to feed and bills to pay don't live off that much.

Genuinely - what are they doing with it?

Our DS lives at home, owns his own car and drives to uni (about 45 minutes). He hasn’t taken out a loan and works part time. He doesn’t pay us any rent and we also help out with his phone contract and fuel costs.

Yes, the £2k a term all-in has been the unexpected (to us) benefit of DS going to an old, rich, collegiate university. Also DS has always ended up with cheaper rooms in the ballot at the lower end of the room grading - some of the nicer rooms in college cost much more. We'll probably get a shock on costs if our younger dc end up somewhere more expensive.

Rent is 600
I was skint at Uni and don't want my kids to be

@Pinkbendyman
How does he join in with socialising and drinks? Or does he not drink? I’m not in favour of drinking a lot but part of uni is socialising.

The simple answer is you are expected to top up to the full loan - so if they get the minimum, then you are looking at about £4.5 - £5K.

Many students manage on less.
So many factors though, and so many options for you and your student to look in to.

Ds2’s loan just covers his rent.

We give him £350 a mth and he works 10 hrs per week. But he says he’ll ask for the whole of May and June off work for his exams.

Coming home every now and again on the train is £68 return with his rail card.