How often do you give your DC top-up money for university?

[llamalines]

If your DC don't get the full grant, how often do you give them your contribution?

Do you give them it fairly often e.g. weekly or monthly, or do you give them a larger sum and let them manage it e.g. termly or yearly?

Thanks :)

We used to pay their accommodation, they lived off the grant they got, and they worked PT.

Monthly standing order

Monthly

Useful, thanks

Fixed sum 1st of the month here. It was generally enough to cover their rent with a bit left over. They managed!

Grant ? I assume you mean loan 😉

Monthly

Termly

We have two at Uni and pay them monthly.

Monthly

Monthly direct debit

Mine live off their minimum loans which they receive termly.
We pay their rents.

Yup, loan!

Our contribution is pretty much the rent in halls so plan is pay rent and them live off minimum loan.

We pay rent, monthly.
DS lives off minimum loan and also works. Once or twice a term he asks for a bit extra - usually £50 towards bills, or I’ll get him an online grocery shop.

We asked them what they preferred and they opted for monthly. Also top up rent payments termly.

😂😂😂 "top up money"! Jesus, I wish we had been that rich.

Unless you have a joint household income of under £25,000 then your dc don’t get full loan and you are expected to top up.

Started off weekly.
The eldest was poor at managing money before he went (earned quite a lot from PT jobs in 6th form, but the money burned a hole in his pocket) so we started giving him money weekly on a Monday, so he should have enough to buy food each week.
Changed it to monthly in the 2nd year.
Gave choice to the other dc when they went and they asked for weekly to start, and we moved them to monthly too, from 2nd year.

For DD on minimum loan I paid rent and bills, a few one off expenses (annual gym membership, car insurance etc) and a monthly chunk of money. I know she had her loan in a savings account and drip fed that money to her current account.

I also sent a standing order of £50 every Monday because that way I knew she could never entirely run out of money for the week ahead.

We have to top up their rent on a quarterly basis as the maintenance grant doesn't even cover that! We then send £100 per week.

I gave ds the choice. He asked for it weekly. His loan was used for rent and the top up used for weekly food shopping.

In first year I've paid the hall fees upfront and then they've lived off the minimum loan. Thereafter, monthly. Since most people get paid monthly it seems sensible to get used to managing a monthly budget at University.

We pay the balance of their rent into their student bank account every term, that combined with their entire student loan for that term (minimum) pays the full cost of their accommodation. To give you an idea of cost, min loan was £4.5k and his accommodation was £6.4k for first year a few years ago. For Ds2 that will be around £7.5k when he goes in September.

Then Ds preferred weekly payments so we paid him automatically every week via Monzo as he could divide the money into pots. We had discussions all the way through as to whether the wanted his supermarket element front loaded or all of it termly or monthly and he stuck with weekly.

Some things were monthly though, phone, Spotify, Amazon Prime, Netflix.

He is very good at budgeting and sensible spending wise. I think as he was our first to go to uni we all understood that it could be renegotiated at any point.

Monthly so any bigger expenses can be paid for and it’s less admin. DD1 had cheap accommodation. DD2 in London didn’t. We topped up rent. Also paid for phone and more expensive clothes, holiday and laptop. Weekly is a bit more like pocket money so we thought they needed to budget as adults.