How much for a student living in London

[ChimneyPot]

DD will be doing a foundation course in musical theatre in London starting in September.
She will be in private student halls so will have no utility bills.
We are not from the U.K. so the advice about topping up student loans doesn’t apply.
I have read other threads and a few people seem to say they need £500 per month of self catering outside London.
How much would a student need self catering in London?

I think you meant to quote me.
Most international students are very rich - the sort that make blank checks out to their kids. The OP clearly isn't if she's even asking the question. I was one of the few, and if you try to keep up with the others no amount of money will be enough.

There are more of the 'poorer' types these days as the £ has weakened especially and costs of universities in other countries have increased. In mine for example we can do twinning programs spending a year or two in the U.K.

Catering type jobs are plenty easy to come by - especially in London! The best part is they are zero hours, you can pick and choose shifts as you want. It's also extremely easy to get, they take anybody with a pulse now that all the EU people have left.

Also, if you read my post properly I said £30 - £40.

From Tesco:
Laila Basmati rice 10 kg : £14.40 - 88 servings, working out to 15p a portion
Tesco Chicken Drumsticks 1.5 kg : £3.75 - 0.9375 per serving
Sauces, condiments etc - Shouldn't be more than 10 p per serving
Tesco Frozen Brocolli Florets £1.30 900g - 14 p per serving assuming 100g per serving

That's £1.50 a meal, multiplied by 14 comes to 21, And I haven't included breakfast :) You can get 1 kg of oats for under a pound, milk 1 p a litre. Alternatively go to bakeries at closing time you can get stuff half price.

You can even get things like Morrisons' Ready made chicken, at closing time they bag the stuff up and I got 10 drumsticks for £3. Apps like Too Good to Go, again leftovers for very low prices.

Of course OP is free to give her child more but she can always increase it. You may want to be more comfortable but to say £40 a week isn't enough ... hmm not quite true.

Also OP you can check out rough grocery prices for UK supermarkets online. Tesco, Aldi, Lidl. You can have a go at calculating yourself, no need to take anybody else's word for it

Who has room, as a student in halls of residence kitchen , to buy rice in bulk? 1.5 kgs of chicken. To be stored where? Along with the bulk buys of potatoes, lentils, Tim’s oc tomatoes, flour and fish fingers? This isn’t typical student living in a hall of residence kitchen. It’s family living. You can choose the value items but unfortunately lunch, breakfast and drinks do cost if you want a varied diet snd do
not want to be at a supermarket or bakery at closing time!

£500 a month is a decent starting point without needing extreme frugality.

Well it depends on the halls of residence but mine certainly had space - because so many of the students ate out and never cooked at all, open season for those who did! My university had a large proportion of international students.
Also I'm laughing at being 'at a supermarket or bakery at closing time'.... that's what students do! They don't have 9-5 jobs like you, and they certainly aren't going to bed at 9 p.m. London is very densely packed and halls of residence are usually quite central so you don't even have to trek around to various supermarkets and bakeries. They're just there.

Anyway I do think you've misunderstood the point of my post. Of course people are different, but students tend to prefer fun money to 'normal life' money. I didn't have 'only' a frugal amount to spend on food but fun things like theatre, sports societies, tube/bus fares, alcohol etc all adds up. To that end the 'my time' equivalent of £40 (I think it was £25? not sure) was all I spent on food. Easy for me though. I was taught to cook as a child so I never saw it as 'being frugal'. I have always eaten healthy, made my own meals and not snacked so it wasn't a big shock.

OP need not worry that her kid will starve on £500, she will have plenty but depending on what she wants to do it may not be enough. But also, at that point OP's kid will already be there and have an idea of what she wants to spend on and why.

I am with Moredarkchocolateplease in never paying more than £30 for a theatre ticket, and usually a lot less.

Queue at the ROH or National Theatre for day tickets. Look out for student or young people discounts . Have TodayTix and CentralTickets apps. Be on the look out for free stuff - there are lots of free concerts, or student productions. I suspect a lot of those posting do not live in London, and so see London as a place to go to for an (expensive) weekend.

£550 should be plenty, though with money the question is a bit "how long is a piece of string". DS used to cook with friends (I suspect they did the cooking) and took packed lunches into college. Not all international students are rich, and the ones who are not can be very thrifty. You can walk most places in central London and cycling is a better option than in many cities. (Hire bikes, lots of bike lanes often in quieter streets and a near universal 20mph speed limit for cars.)

Hidden behind tourist London or office London is a whole parallel student London. There are a lot of Universities, all with things on. Ethnic food can be very cheap. Get to know yellow label time in the nearest supermarket and get the TooGoodtoGo app. Our experience of having DC studying in both in London and elsewhere is that it need not be any more expensive.

Yes. Definitely cheap theatre tickets available. It would not be fun to be in London as a musical theatre student and see no professional theatre.

I agree with starting around £500 mark as an allowance- as I said above my DD finds it plenty and she socialises a lot. You might think about giving her an extra £300-500 for the first month so she can go to all the freshers events she wants to and can buy any stuff she needs for her course or her room if she gets there and finds she needs it. Anything left over can be used as a cushion. THe only thing that might cause a problem is if she can't get a cheap flight home at popular holiday times and needs to pay for a more expensive one.

£575 pcm for London is very low rental.

For a room in a shared house?

@LoudSnoringDog Yes. 2 beds are often £1800 plus. More bedrooms is cheaper but not by huge amounts. Depends where it is and what it is though! Plus how well it’s maintained and how many bathrooms.

Yes, my dd will be sharing a 6-bed house with friends in the Docklands. Her rent is roughly 200 per week, so 800 pm, excluding share of utilities.

Tizer, I think you are wrong. Your suggested rental prices always astound me. Did your daughter rent a new build along the river or something.

I am a landlord and have just let a nice 4 double bedroom house in Greenwich in a good residential area near the park and tenants are paying £725 each, albeit they are actors/musicians rather than students. There are plenty of shabbier areas around which would be cheaper. Transport links, especially the Elizabeth line, have opened up a lot of cheaper areas. DS rented an ex Council flat in Holborn very close to his University, which they made affordable by not having a living room, and not having to pay for transport.

The £725 is pcm.

For free or cheap shows have a look at
https://www.myboxoffice.biz/#
It's is a seat filling service and the membership annual fee is £15. Event organisers use this service to fill seats, so the event looks more popular than it would be, based only on people who pay full price for tickets.

There are tickets available for a wide range of shows including opera, dance, comedy and sports. When you register you will be asked to select which genres interest you the most; you will be notified when these tickets are available.

Tickets are generally free (or highly discounted) – you will just need to pay a small administration fee, perhaps only £2-£3. Once you book a ticket you are honour-bound to attend. Other conditions are that you be discrete, enthusiastic and go to as many shows as possible.

920/month pp, nothing fancy but zone 1. Sharing with one other person

Filka, I agree. I would also assume that musical theatre students would be first port of call when theatres are looking to paper an audience.

I love living in London. I am self employed so will quite often take myself off last minute to a matinee. Last week it was Our England at the National, which I loved. OP, once you get over the practicalities your DD should love living in London. There is so much on and such variety.

No DDs didn’t have anything flash. Our own flat to begin with. I know what their friends are paying and Dc of my friends. Interesting the £800-900 isn’t far off what others are paying. I put caveats on the prices I quoted. Also rent a room is £7500 a year, so the price above is less than that too.

Living at home in the family flat is very different. Presumably it was you who decided to charge them £800-900. Plus aren’t they and their friends will be in their 30s, so some way off being students living on loans.

The rent I am getting should be pretty typical. I used Foxtons which never knowingly under-prices.

We were in this exact situation 2 years ago except for a postgrad.

We paid DD’s fees and rent (excluding bills). She got a part time job working FOH in a theatre. This paid for her food and bills, however this was before energy went up. Her rent in a shared house was £550 but the going rate is a lot more now.

She spent about £35 per week on food plus a bit extra on food out (on work gets she finished class at 5pm & didn’t get home til 11pm

Bills were approx £10 per week, you’d need to allow more now

Phone £10 per month

Sheet music approx £5 per week

Dance shoes & tights are expensive. She also had pointe shoes

She cycled everywhere apart from late nights home when she got the tube

Rarely bought theatre tickets apart from student shows and comps from work.

DS Is about to start at Kings to do his masters degree.

3 bed flat, shared with two others is 2900 pm in SE1. Bills are coming in at just under 150pm each. He's budgeting for 150 a week to live on after rent/bills are paid but is hoping to do it on less.

@Needmoresleep As you can see realistic prunes for 2023 have changed . I charged DDs nothing but I now charge £7500 for a tenant under rent a room. DD does too. That’s cheap for both areas and mostly shared accommodation is £800 a month for even so so areas.

Are both properties in student areas and are you and your daughter letting to students?

The experience of a student able to live in mummy and daddy’s London pied de terre (with presumably a rather nice family home in the countryside to retreat to during vacations) is very different the experience of most London, and other, students. Not least their expectations of comfort are likely to be higher.

Students get good at finding cheaper areas and properties. Deptford, say, is good for Kings (train to Charing Cross), flats above shops, ex council or on noisy main roads. A bit grottier than home but you get to live in London and the chance to access some very good higher education.

prunes? Prices! There’s just a shortage of accommodation so prices are high. As indeed they are in lots of cities. Commercial landlords will usually charge more. We do rent a room because it suits us re tax and renting to people we know. Commercially, the rents are higher.

The only way my daughter was able to find somewhere to live was to share with graduates, not other students. It's so competitive to find a property in London. You end up in a bidding war. She took the place of someone who was moving away for work, her housemates had found the house pre-covid and gradually it went from being a student house to the tenants being replaced one by one.

Just disappeared into a rabbit hole of public transport in London for students....they couldn't have made it more complicated.