Do you have a budget to spend on Home Ed things (resources, activities etc)?

[ibblewob]

We're considering HEing (well, I am and hoping DH might poss come round in the next two years!), and was just wondering if you had a set amount put aside to spend on HE stuff each month.

I know there's as many different situations and ways of doing things as there are home edders, but any rough estimates would be really useful.

Thanks!

Nope. But I am charity shop queen, and you have a hard time spending more than £10 at a time in a charity shop cos you can't carry any more home on the bus...

No set budget yet, but I have had start up costs of membership of EO and buying, by choice, a whole load of books from EO. I could have got them 2nd hand from amazon though.

We have only been doing it for 3 weeks so far.

I also got a couple of maths workbooks for me to do out of interest and hopefully involve DS2 in as he enjoys maths.

Total £95 so far.

No actual cost relates to DS2, all this has been for my benefit as the home edding parent!

I allocate a £12 per month book budget to each child anyway. DS2 decided he wanted some car magazines so I reckoned that was what HE is all about and said yes/yippee!

No set budget, but each of the children were aware that our finances were more limited since we home educated (and I cut down on hours at work)
So they chose their own priorities.

Dd2 has decided she wants to do the silver award in sailing, so knows we'll need to find the money for that, so has decided not to go to the residential singing school with her choir at Easter.

We find our biggest expense is transport costs as we are very sociable and go to meetings, camps and gatherings when we can.
We managed to get a half price family railcard and that has helped, I was surprised how much money we saved on each train fare with that.

We save money by using charity shops/Amazon second hand books and Ebay a lot.
We also only holiday on HE camps or by using Travel lodge offers or Sun newspaper holidays.

(BTW if you by a family railcard on line at the moment you can get a free family membership for the YHA)

We don't do a budget, we are on a low income so our kids have always understood that they don't get much. We have managed fine from charity shops, freecycle and boot sales over the years

Our main home education related expense is the cost of getting out and about, and the various activities they want to do. My daughter currently does drama (£3), home ed group (£1), Self defence (thankfully paid for by YOF funding), Japanese (£3.75), swimming (£4), and skating (£2.50) each week, as well as one off activities. There is also the petrol cost for getting to these, and the cost of loss of earnings for us while we are there with her instead of working.

I have a £20 per week budget for getting about but this doesn't include petrol, books, games etc. In reality it probably comes to about £200 per month, some months are cheaper, some more expensive. For instance last month (I keep track of the spending) was £50. The month we went down to London for a couple of days,for the King Tut exhibition, pushed £350.
It can be as cheap or expensive as you want it to be really.
I know some families who car share, swap resources etc, others that by in a curriculum for about £600 but I don't whether this is a term or year. Basically there's lots of ways of doing things. hth

buy not by

Thanks everyone, that's really interesting.

One of my friends has just started doing it with her 4 year old - she bought a curriculum from America for about £150 for the year. Another mum who HEs 4 kids says they budget probably very roughly about £1000 a year for activities etc. Mehetabel, all those activities really start adding up! But they sounds really great though. Better start saving now!

not really

the thing is, especially since we are very unstructured, I suspect we'd spend the same amount of money on the kids anyway.

However, like Julie, the kids (the oldest at least) are aware that, mainly because of the decision to HE, we have a limited budget, and we can't always (usually, really) buy whatever we want

emma you are oh SO wrong re "you have a hard time spending more than £10 at a time in a charity shop "

this is what pushchairs are for imo...sling for baby, pushchair for assorted educational games and so forth...

not really. We never did the workbook thing. Travel to groups on the bus probably cost the most but I guessed we saved money not having to buy school uniforms.
Home ed camps have always been our biggest expense but we treat them as our family holiday and don't go anywhere else.
Libraries are fantastic for books on everything.
Home edders can sometimes get book shop discounts. Always ask just in case. Borders will do one, some waterstones will.