Spending money

[youngones1]

How much spending money do you give your children at uni? I was thinking £500 per month would be reasonable.

Yes my DS is at Lancaster and accommodation alone is £6800 (not en suite).

That would mean spending only £35 a week over the 31 weeks of term for food, travel, laundry, clubs and societies, college subs, books, clothing, toiletries, socialising. Simply not feasible even at most cheaper universities.

Indeed - rent varies hugely from uni to uni and city to city. DSs accommodation is £7,700 pa which we pay and on top of that he has to pay for food, laundry, travel, gym, sports clubs, going out - which he uses the minimum maintenance loan for.

Which city? I thought DD was looking at cheaper places, but think she would struggle to keep her spending anywhere near that low.

Or are you topping up in kind with food parcels, buying bits and bobs etc?

Even DD in cheaper city would only have £1600 left for everything else after accommodation and bills. Not sure how your DD is doing everything for that?

If you do a STEM subject it is very unlikely you'll have enough time to do a job with enough hours to earn anything meaningful. Timetable is very full

If you're paying for the accommodation, the minimum loan should be enough for everything else. Lots of people do it this way. £1000 pm for accommodation is at the expensive end too, it's possible to find much cheaper halls and rentals outside the obvious places.

The worst uni choices for accommodation are the ones with Londonish prices but without London weighting, like Bristol and Edinburgh. But there are plenty of great unis with more reasonable costs, like Oxford, Cambridge, Birmingham, Warwick, Aberdeen, Lancaster, Cardiff, Leicester, Dundee, Nottingham, Sheffield, Loughborough etc.

Then you also have tuition fees which are £9,000 per year, I believe.

They’re irrelevant for budgeting purposes since it’s paid directly to the university

Min loan topped up by us to full student loan amount here. After rent and bills they are left with £43 a week ( over 52 weeks) . They work during holidays to get a buffer and to pay for extras . They earn a few thousand during the long summer holiday . We also pay for phone and insurance and one big shop at the beginning of each year .

the minimum maintenance loan doesn't cover all her rent. The loan goes towards her accomodation and we pay the rest. Then we pay her £60 a week towards food/going out. I do send the odd tenner here and there, probably about £30-40 a months worth, for things like laundry, bit of extra beer money etc.

Dd gets minimum loan - this year it covers her accommodation (Nottingham, grotty student house) which is £80 a week, although next year it goes up to £100 for a bigger (2 extra students) and nicer house, so we'll have to top the loan up. We pay the bills, her car insurance (which allows her to get to her job) of £150 a month, her gym membership and phone contract and we give her £60 a week in term time only. She works in term time as a carer and gets around £100 a week and in holidays at a warehouse (in between holidays abroad!) which covers her socialising and other luxuries. She also bought her car from her earnings last year.

People who assume that those earning over the threshold for minimum loan can afford to top up to the maximum loan aren't taking into account things like mortgage payments or other dependants. We never earned anywhere near the threshold until 3 years ago, but in order to increase our earnings we also had to move to a more expensive area and take on a big mortgage over 20 years. This means that we've never had the capability to save for uni previously, as we would have done if we'd been on this income for years, and we also have a much higher mortgage than many of our peers who've been earning at this level for a long time. I know dd has felt under financial pressure and she managed to get a payment from the uni hardship fund, but we help her as much as we can. And we do send her back with food whenever she's home (which seems to be fairly regularly!)>

I pay accommodation. They have their minimum loan and I top that up so that they have £500 a month to spend

We pay 1100 to each of our’s
Rent is just under 600
We also pay legacy stuff like phones ,contact lenses,essential clothing

No loans and no term time working
In Scotland so no tuition fees