Weekly budget at uni

[1Wanda1]

How much does your child have to spend per week AFTER rent and bills?

DS and DD both have a weekly spending budget of around £65. Both in unis outside London. DD is sticking to this no problem. DS keeps overspending, has maxed out the overdraft, now doesn't have enough money to pay December rent, and the only way he'll be able to do so is if we bail him out (again).

He doesn't seem to think anything is wrong, as says he hasn't been living extravagantly and only goes out once a week and it's just "cost of living". I think that £65 a week is plenty to buy food and a few drinks.

He's looking for a job but that's not really the point. He thinks I'm really unreasonable and mean and I don't know how to get him to budget. Is £65 enough or am I deluded?

I do agree about the work though. He should be working.

I think this is true. Because we are high earners dd gets a smaller loan. She 100% wouldn't be able to live on this, it doesn't even cover her rent. So we pay the rest.

The govt expect parents to contribute in many many cases.

I guess it depends what you are used to. My ds is used to mixing with friends who live on very little and know they have to work because their parents are not well off.

As I have said multiple times before I give him the equivalent of a full student loan. After rent and bills are paid that gives him £68.50 per week to live on . That is food, phone, travel, socialising and course related expenses. He says it is plenty and he usually manages to put some in a savings account most weeks.

I don't want to get into a cat fight, but labelling anything but an amount equivalent to the full loan from parents as "inadequate" (despite a student having signinficant savings or a job) is just unreasonable.

There is no need to be "horrifed" at threads like this and a parent expecting a child to use some of their savings to top themselves up isn't "leaving them to struggle".

i do firmly believe parents should make up the amount to the maximum loan
I appreciate this may involve some sacrifices and that some people may not be able to afford it
If that is the case the earlier DC are told this the better
My In-laws‘couldn’t afford’to support my DH to go away back in the day,despite 3 foreign holidays a year
they found the money when his brother (golden child) wanted to go to Uni in another city
still rankles 35 years on

My figures again. This gives ds the same amount (give or take £3.50 per week) to live on as the OP's ds gets.

Ds gets the minimum £4,500 loan

His rent is £7,037 so we have to pay a top up.

We then top up to maximum loan amount which amounts to the sum of £2,463 which divided over the teaching weeks gives ds approx £68.50 per week to live off.

He pays for EVERYTHING out of this.

OP, with other extras you are paying such as gym membership and travel then he is getting more than £65 per week. Your ads may well be very generous to his friends which is a nice trait to have but perhaps he does n’t realise how much extra it is costing him and needs help to set limits as you suggest. I may well be classified as controlling but if my DCs wanted an increase from the agreed amount and needed bailing out regularly then I would definitely want to go over their bank statements with them to understand their ‘cost of living’.

@user1487194234 where there is a choice (i.e. we'll go on 3 foreign holidays or we'll top up our child's maintenance loan) then it would seem harsh for parents not to do that. Lots of families however don't choose not to pay to the full loan amount, they can't. Yes, children should be aware of that & think about their options.

It's not a choice here though, the OP has 3 children, 2 of whom are at university and she's suggesting it would be a struggle to pay any more. But, even if she were able to, her son had built up savings whilst he worked for the year before he went to uni so he could top up the parental contribution himself.

Also, she had (presumably) let her son live at home for the year that he worked, supported him financially no doubt to some extent for that year which allowed him to build up those savings. Its not unreasonable to expect him to use some of that to maintain himself when he knows the family's financial circumstances.

@ArcticSkewer "I am routinely a bit horrified on these threads by the middle class parents who leave their child to struggle."

What do you suggest I do? Magic the money from somewhere? It is not the case that I HAVE the extra money but choose not to give it: I just don't have it.

But thanks for repeatedly telling me that what I am able to do is "inadequate". Amazing insight.

I am ashamed to say we are giving DS £160 pw in termtime. This is what the College recommends. It should cover hobbies, books and clothes. I have agreement it will reflect SMP as the amount the government thinks someone who is unable to work needs to have a decent quality of life.

DS is strongly discouraged from working in term time by the college. We want him to enjoy his time at University and not be worried about where his next meal is coming from. His grandmother is paying his hall fees.

That's nice of your DS's grandmother. I wish my kids had the same sort of contribution. If they did, they'd have loads of spending money.

YANBU, mine had £50 a week and managed food and a night out with that, but did work through the summer so had savings to pay for extras. That said, this was a couple of years ago and things have gone up.

With regard to not having the money for rent, in order to help him manage he got his loan paid into our account each term. We would then pay the monthly rent which we had to top up, and then put an allowance weekly onto his Monzo which helped budget and prevented him spending rent money on going out. As it is he's pretty responsible and I doubt it would've happened but it just made it easier.

@1Wanda1 My DC all have the maximum loan. DC1 and 2 are pretty sensible and stick to their budgets, but DC3 is very much like your son in terms of extravagance (and she has not spent it on food/bills/rent - those things are afterthoughts for her). She refused to get a job in summer because she'd "worked so hard" (she hadn't). So now she has no money. I can't bail her out even if I wanted to.

It was a great mistake to make parents financially responsible for their student children. It's the knock-on effect of Tony Idiot Blair and his 50% quota; there was never going to be any other way to fund it.

I'm not saying there's any easy answer to this, but expecting parents who are not-quite-poor-enough to pay over 9K per year to support adult children who can't be arsed to get a job and who choose to blow their loans/overdrafts on going out and having a good time is not it.

I wasn’t arguing about the OP’s position,if she doesn’t have it she doesn’t have it
But I do know quite a few people where we live who don’t seem to prioritise supporting their DC
One of my DS’s pals wanted to go away to Uni and his mother made it clear to me that they could afford it but weren’t prepared to pay

@greaterscott "With regard to not having the money for rent, in order to help him manage he got his loan paid into our account each term. We would then pay the monthly rent which we had to top up, and then put an allowance weekly onto his Monzo which helped budget and prevented him spending rent money on going out."

Great idea, and one I suggested to DS today as the basis on which I'm willing to be his guarantor for next year's lease. He flatly refused this and said he was not willing to let me "control" his money and would rather "fuck himself by not having a guarantor" than agree to that.

There is no way in hell freezing over I would be my son's guarantor in your circumstances.

It is reasonable for you to say that a condition of you being a guarantor is that his rent money is put in a ring-fenced account so you are sure the rent will be paid.

It is reasonable for you to say that he gets a fixed amount of money from you, after which there is no more.

It is somewhat reasonable for you to say that you will give him your parental contribution at whatever intervals you want to. Personally, I think doling out money weekly is a mistake. It is better for young people to learn to manage their own money while at university than it is to drop them in completely at the deep end when they go out into the world and start earning proper money.

It is not reasonable for you to coerce or otherwise attempt to seize sole control of another adult's own money (which his loan is). It is financial abuse.

I gave Ds the choice of weekly or monthly and he chose weekly.

but I work for a company where the majority of workers are still paid weekly.

@Phphion "financial abuse"? Come off it! DS has demonstrated that he can't manage his money, to the point that without me bailing him out, he can't pay his rent next month. I am now asked to act as guarantor for his rent, bills and other obligations next year. What I have proposed is that he gives me his loan, and I give that back to him in monthly (not weekly) chunks to pay his rent, thereby ensuring that he can pay his rent so that I am not called on under the guarantee. He retains control of the rest of his money and can budget that as he likes for his living expenses.

Reading the other posts on this thread this is what other families do to help their children budget.

Can he arrange to pay his rent termly in one with when he receives his loan?

@1Wanda1 You agreed with someone who said that they had their DC's loan paid into their bank account, which presumably the DC cannot access, and that they gave their DC their own money back to them as a weekly allowance on a Monzo card. You said that this was not only what you had proposed to your DS but what you were insisting he should do.

If you want to insist as a condition of being a guarantor that he pays over the rent money to you, to be held in a dedicated account, as soon as he gets his loan, so you can be sure that his rent is paid and you are not held liable, that seems a fair compromise.

Coercing, forcing, demanding, requiring an adult to give you all their money, denying them access to their own money, placing excessive contols on when and how an adult spends their own money is not 'helping your child to budget'. It is financial abuse of an adult.

Op he is not going to learn if you keep bailing him out.Definitely some tough love needed.
Being irresponsible with money at his age does not bode well for the future
He needs to get a job asap

Both my dds have a term time job. They both work for eight hours a week. Rent and bills are already paid . One of them is in private student halls and my other dd is in student halls.
Dh and I cover any major purchases. We are willing to do this because they are both wiling to work

Mumsnet can be a very weird place.

My son has already had the option of putting his rent money into a "dedicated account". He chose not to do so. In any event, even if he had done so he would have then dipped into it, exactly as he did with his savings last year.

No one agrees to act as guarantor for someone who has a history of default, without some conditions. In fact, that is the whole basis of the terms on which most guarantees arise.

Financial abuse. What nonsense.