How much for DC uni?

[Twobigsapphires]

Eldest DC is off to uni next year. I know contributions and individual financial situations are all different but how much are you spending on supporting your dc through uni and / or saving with them not living at home? Interested to hear how others are managing and approaching it.

We are a low income family and don’t contribute anything except the odd £20 here and there - she gets full maintenance loan and grant and gets a bursary from the university itself which works out about £35 a week. She’s managing fine so far. We wish we could do more but I’m disabled and cannot work and we have a disabled child (both on highest rates of pip / dla). Dh works full time but his wage is fairly low and we live rurally so not many higher paid opportunities. When dd went to university our tax credits and child benefit dropped so we were suddenly £200 a month worse off so it’s been very tight. But very proud of her for going and she’s doing really well.

First thing to do is to put your income numbers into the calculator on the government website, they will tell you how much loan (living costs) your dc will get. If it's less than the full loan I would suggest budgeting if possible to top it up to the full amount. I would also make sure they know how to make cheap meals and send them with a substantial starter kit for food as this is a major expense where they can save money easily - eg my dd took 5kg rice, 6kg pasta, 24 cans chopped tomatoes, 5kg dried lentils and several packs of spices, she is mostly vegan

My youngest gets a minimum loans plus a substantial bursary so we only give her £60 a month for basic food/pocket money. The elder doesn't get any loan (don't ask) so we paid her fees (or rather her dad did) and she used savings for halls, then earns some money, I give her £120 a month, all I can afford. She has around £7500 total for the year which is sufficient as it's a cheap city, hoping the loan kicks in next year!

Re the food… many universities offer catered halls which takes the worry out of budgeting for food. Obviously it costs more but once paid they know they’re getting 3 meals a day regardless of whatever happens with the rest of their money! (This is what dd has done, with her university they also get £5 a day loaded onto a lunch card to spend at costa / subway / Starbucks etc if they don’t want to eat lunch in the halls).

Our DC will get the minimum loan and we're expected to top up about £5k per year per child - we're planning to pay their accommodation and let them live off the minimum loan, which is what friends seem to do. We're saving quite hard to be able to do that because we have 3 DC and will have at least 3 years when we'll have 2 children there at the same time. We expect them to get part-time jobs too but will have to see how that pans out.

My dd gets the basic loan of about 4.5kpa so we pay her accommodation which this year is 5k.
We can't afford to give any extra - we're just into the income bracket that means she only gets the basic.
She was nagged til I was blue in the face about needing a job when she got there - apparently there are none in Lincoln!?

When I was at university my parents earned too much gor me to get any kind of grant (as it was then) so they gave me exactly the amount I would have got from the government if they'd been on the lowest income. That's always struck me as fair (although it ignores the random small amounts a low income parent might still manage to give their student!).

So that's what we'll do if any of ours do conventional degrees straight after school - our eldest is doing a different route which I don't think is common in the UK but means she'll be earning a good wage from age 19 but still end up with a degree, and hopefully dc2 will do similar.

In the UK it'd be about 9k a year living away from home outside London or 12k in London.

www.gov.uk/student-finance/new-fulltime-students

We were still overseas when ds started at uni so no maintenance loan. We paid his rent and then £350 per month and all travel expenses to return home. He did not work in term time, but had two pretty decent internships in the summer vacation and used this for any extra spending money he needed.

The fixed gov amounts do not take into account the variation in costs at different universities.

The following needs to be covered - by loans, grants or family donations.

Fees
Accommodation, incl utilities etc
Food - a budget or catering package.
Phone/insurance
Fun money

Some universities will allow students to get a job, some won’t.

Dependant on the university, the budget will change. It would be sensible to look at costs before you apply if money is tight. Not fair, nor equitable- but sensible.

Fees are separate @Witchlight - they not the parents' responsibility no matter what level of income the household has - all students have a loan for their fees and it has nothing to do with the maintenance loan (where parents are expected to "top up" the maintenance loan available if they earn over a certain amount).

We pay ours 1k a month
Rent about 600
Also pay for phones ,contact lenses

Like many others we pay DD's rent and mobile phone and she lives off her maintenance loan and a £1000 annual university scholarship. If she wants more she'll need to get a job, but has never needed to.
We did the same for DS but he had a choral scholarship of £1000 annually and did some football refereeing for a bit of extra cash. He's a spender!

Should have said they both got minimum maintenance loan.

DS has the minimum maintenance loan, but he's really careful with money. We have paid for his accommodation, which was approx £6000 for the year & we set up a direct debit of £200 per month, so approx £50 extra a week? I don't know how this compares with his peers. We're very lucky to be financially comfortable & also that DS is a saver not a spender so realistically he would have been fine with just his maintenance loan. I think the big difficulty is financing accommodation, because the basic maintenance loan itself wouldn't cover it.

Thanks for all your responses. Ds will also only get the minimum maintenance loan leaving a shortfall of at least 1k to cover rent. Then of course there is monthly food and travel etc. I’m panicking how we are going to cover all this to be fair.

We pay the accommodation and they live off the loan.
They also work.

Families need to look into this several years before Uni.

Many find their kids don’t qualify for more than the minimum maintenance loan, so they are expected to top up to the full amount, which could be £5k or could be more if Uni is in an expensive location. So that’s £15k minimum across 3 years.

Some people can take that out of monthly income and pay it to their kids (so as all it £6k per year, which is £500 a month) but many can’t. But they could have saved £15k if they’d looked into it earlier and saved perhaps £250 per month across 6 years. So starting when the child is 15 or even younger can make all the difference.

My oldest is a that sort of age at the moment. We are looking to save about £750 per month for the next 3 years and to out a similar amount into the pot during Uni…so for about 6-7 years. We aren’t quite decided with what we will do with it yet. We could give the top-up £6k each year and keep the extra to be given for a house deposit in later 20s. Or we might decide to use some or all of the rest of pay off some or all of the student loans….we aren’t decided yet. But the thing for us, is we are accumulating some money so there will be some choices. If we had left it to the year before Uni, our scope to suddenly save this sum would have been much reduced

@WombatChocolate I agree but for some people it's not always on parents' radar, or at least there's a general recognition that parents need to contribute but in our case, we were oblivious to just how much it would be. We were quite shocked at the amount. Maybe we were naive.

For Children 1&2, we only started saving when they were 14/15 so it needs to be £££ per month to build up the required pot. For Child 3, we started saving at 11 and £100 a month will be enough (and seems much more manageable).

DS' University suggested £100 a week as a reasonable budget after paying for accommodation (they're in the cheapest available). DS found they were living well inside this so we've dropped the amount we're chipping in at their suggestion. They're managing on £50 to £60 a week. That's about £15 - £20 a week on food (they're vegan and cook a lot), £6 on laundry, £10 on bus fares and the rest for whatever else they need. This means they could survive on just the remainder of their maintenence loan, without our help, but I don't feel comfortable with that yet.

However, they don't drink or club and the associations they've joined are all doing cheap or free things.

We sent them with good supplies of toiletries and cleaning stuff so they probably won't need more until Christmas at the earliest. They will have a whopping debt when they're finished but we're hoping to keep saving and help them with house deposits when the time comes.

Our shopping bill has dropped by about £30 a week, we're hoping the electric bill does as well, must be at least 5 less chargers plugged in about the place!

Yes, Martin Lewis the Money Saving Expert is always campaigning that the government should make clearer that the maintenance loan won’t cover the full cost of living for many, and parents are expected to top up to the full amount.

Lots of families don’t realise, ir don’t realise until it’s too late to save much, or don’t want to make any contribution. Lots of kids don’t get a penny from family for a variety of reasons (often very good ones but not always) and only get the minimum loan for maintenance and so need to work a lot of hours.

I’d hope my kids will have holiday jobs at least over the summer. I think the idea of contributing towards your own costs seems natural to them, plus there’s huge benefit to doing some of the jobs you hope you won’t do your whole life, to have an appreciation of what they are like and how people live. When I was a student, few people worked in term time, and Id like to think my kids could avoid that and summer jobs will be enough, but we will see how things go.

I’ve got 2, but when you’ve got 3 or 4, especially close together in age, I think it must all be much more daunting, especially if the oldest has got to their mid teens before any thought has been given to saving something.

I paid the difference in rent and the maintenance loan and gave my DC £85 per week during term time and £10 per week during the summer holidays. It worked out at £6000 in total. My food bill did go down but not as much as I expected as I started to buy more bits in M&S.
I had 2 years with 2 DC at uni so it did work out an expensive time.

I haven’t read the full thread but to offer my perspective from someone who has been supported by divorced parents: I received £300 pcm between them. My maintenance loan JUST covered my accommodation and I also worked part time throughout uni in various jobs and then more hours in the summer to pay for fun. I saw the £300 per month as for essentials: food, study materials etc, transport, bills, rainy day fund, and my job was for savings. I did a lot of travelling in the holidays and it meant I had some money saved to move straight to London when I graduated. I appreciated the £ and didn’t really need more - lots of people had far greater contributions but of those I know, it didn’t help them in the long run. These are the people who generally don’t have such a good relationship with money and have struggled to know what “to do” after uni as they’ve never had to support themselves. This isn’t always the case but just an observation. Good luck x

I top up the rent payments and give my son £50 a week for food and on top I pay his mobile phone, any new clothes, uni equipment, prescriptions etc. I also send additional money if he needs it.

DS just gone into his third year - didn’t realise that it is deemed they don’t need as much money in the last year, so they don’t receive as much maintenance loan as year 1 & 2, despite still having to pay the same rent, bills etc for the full year. DS does not get a full loan, we are topping up by £300 per month and Grandparents help too. Also worth knowing that the maintenance loan is paid in September, January and April where most rental contracts start in August-so they need two months rent before any loan comes in as it gets paid around the 20th of the month, plus allow for a deposit too. The loan is split and they get smaller amounts in September and January with more in April.
Whole system seems very unfair to me and financial worries have contributed to anxiety for my DS, could do with an overhaul I feel.

so unfair that they get less in third year
what is their reasoning?
third year is very full on