How much do I charge my 20 yr old daughter to live at home?

[mumofthreex]

I would like to know what is the normal amount, and how much it costs to keep them, especially how much I should charge without me making profit. I am a working single mum and buy all her food and make her dinners, special vegetarian meats too.
Anyone who does this for their child and can give any kind of amount they take and breakdown of what it goes to.
This would really help us out as we're having trouble agreeing on what's an appropriate amount.

Thanks in advance

I offered my parents some money when I started earning and they agreed to accept about £100 a month (this was a very long time ago).

However, when it came to me getting a place of my own, it turned out they had been saving everything I gave them so that they could give me a lump sum towards my deposit.

They are lovely people.

An earning adult should contribute to the household they live in both financially and in terms of chores.

OP - you are a Very Sensible Woman. As Trillian says, if she is an earning adult, then she should be contributing towards the cost of the household. It's only by teaching them how much it actually costs to run a house that they will ever learn, and I'm sure her own (adult) pride wouldn't allow her to live rent free.

Costs associated with her living with you (assuming you don't consider the option of moving to a cheaper place or renting out her room to a lodger at market rate):

• 25% of council tax (if she didn't live there you would get single person's discount)
• Food/toiletries/other things you buy in the supermarket
• Extra gas/electric/water (hard to work out, maybe divide total costs by # of people who live in the house)
• Phone usage (or maybe she has a mobile)

If she moved out, rent alone would probably be more than all the above added together, and she would have to pay for her own council tax/food/utilities as well.

I am not from uk and when i go 'home' i see my cousins and friends living like spoiled brats. Some of them are in their 30s and don't know the price of a pint of milk. They live with parents -paying nothing- until they marry. It is common there. They seem to mess their lives all the time and their parents take care of them

We have discussed it with my DH and we are going to charge them when the time comes (even so we can afford not to). Seeing the situation in our countries and how spoiled young people are there gives us very strong opinion about this.

There is nothing to stop any of them moving out and paying more

In a house share you would infact pay your share, if you didn't I can't see your house mates paying it for you

I have 4 adult children. For each of them while they were at school/ Uni they kept all the money from their Saturday/ holiday jobs and were supposed to save some for Uni, on the understanding that we would not contribute to their living costs whilst there (actually could not).

Once they had finished uni and come home then we expected a contribution to their keep from their wages. When they go you realise how much they cost in food and electricity alone- when DS1 left, our weekly shopping bill halved, yet we still had DS2 and DS3 at home.

Any amount they contribute does not come close to what they actually cost, especially once you take into account that you get no CHB and no tax credits for them. It would be a very rare occurrence for a parent to make a profit out of an adult child, and I'm sure nobody would want to. DS1 gave us £100 a fortnight out of his £500 a fortnight full-time take-home pay. He got all his meals provided and his washing done, so I don't think he did too badly out of it.

I take it all the antis have little tiny children? There is a world of difference between minor children and adult children.

I used to give my parets 1/3 of my pay when i lived at home, i was doing an apprentiship at the time, earning £75 a week they got £25, my saturday night out cost me around £25 and i lived on £25 a week for work lunches and travel to work. As I was training as a hairdresser my tips throguh the week helped greatly, but they weren't guarrenteed.

When my DC's (currently 5yo, 3yo and nearly 1yo) are older i will most likely ask for a similar amount from them- 1/3 of take home wage... If we are in a good position to still fund their food costs and the extra council tax then we intend to save it for them and give it back- but they wont know until the time comes for them to move out.

Working it out they wont cost any extra at home than we'll be paying for when they are under 16yo apart from the extra council tax, however, i feel it is important for them to have a sense of importance that the 'bills' are paid first then you can spend the rest of your money... means they will have that view when they come to be living on their own.

I certainly feel paying board at home helped me when i moved out, me and DH have never got payed and not sorted the bills before spending money on other things, even 8 years later we still budget every month for what we have left after our bills and savings etc...

I've just established that DH agrees with everything I said previously. Thankfully.

cantmummyhaveabreak - nothing you said in your last paragraph has anything to do with your parents charging you rent. It's basic life skills that you should have been taught anyway.

gaelicsheep - paying rent/contributing to household expenses obviously provides an opportunity to talk about life skills and budgeting. no, you don't have to do this to reinforce the message, but I think it's important that kids of earning age who are still living at home realise that they are not in for a 'free ride'.

I recall one of my close school friends - never worked, even through Uni, and got to 21 without ever having a job. It was always a bit of a shock for him!
Counter with a friend of mine who didn't have rich parents - worked Saturdays, paid for her own things aged 16, paid rent aged 18, and know how to budget/what things cost.

to let your child get to 21/leaving home before they have decent financial understanding is irresponsible. Charging them rent them they a) can afford it, b) should be paying it and c) treating the house like a hotel. should be compulsory.

misspell -charging them rent WHEN, not them. sorry

Well so long as you are aware that it is just your opinion that this is the only way to do things that's fine. You can't make other people live their lives the way that you might wish (luckily). My dh was brought up in a family that did the rent thing, and I was not. I have a much better idea of how to manage money than he does, and certainly wouldn't treat my parents house as a hotel (what hotel expects you to cook for the other guests!)

I do wonder how much of the difference of opinion comes from whether you expect your children to go straight from school to work, with a fairly long period at home before perhaps moving in with a partner, or you expect them to go away to university, live in shared accommodation and never really live at home again. I expect my children to learn most of the how to live on your own and manage money lessons at university, as I did, so any periods at home as adults I would see as very temporary in nature, so perhaps no need for a different set f rules from those in place when they are teenagers at school.

But you can and should be teaching those skills way before adulthood. I had an allowance (for clothes, books, toys, sweets and anything else I wanted) from the age of 12, and no amount of cajoling got me any more cash, I had to save or earn it. My father paid it into my post office account, and it made me feel very grown up, and appreciate the concept of saving from a young age. I can see that the idea of paying rent when living at home and working could be part of how you help your children grow up, but there are plenty of other ways that you can do that. More than one way to skin a cat after all.

The woman is 20 though - she's hardly growing up. At 20, your own (adult) self-pride shouldn't allow you to live rent free anywhere.

Well I don't know many 20 year olds at the moment, but yes I'd say the ones I do know are certainly in the process of growing up. I know that I was (although of course at the time I would have denied that strenuously). Perhaps that's partly the effect of staying in education until 21.

I agree - I was certainly a very immature student at that age, but by 22 I was living in a shared flat and paying rent. The option of living rent free just wasn't there - and it wouldn't have crossed my mind to query why I was having to spend my hard earned salary on food, rent, utilities etc. As soon as you start to earn, you pay your way.

i was brought up by my grandmother who was on a state pension at the time, when i started working after i left college at 18, her housing benefit and council tax benefit was rduced because i was working therefore i had to pay the rest to make up the rent and council tax, which was about £200 at the time, also on top of this i paid her an extra £100 a month for food, although she never asked for this, i could not expect her to pay rent/council tax and buy food for me, basically if i wasnt living there she wouldnt have had these extra things to buy..
believe it or not, these were the best days of my life living at home and only paying a small amount of my wage and being able to spend the rest on ME!!!!
baring in mind this was before i had my 3dcs lol !

My BIL is 33, lives at home and has never contributed a penny. He has no savings and as far as I can see spends all his wages on booze and cannabis. MIL is only just beginning to wonder if she should ask for a contribution.

If you have finished education and are working then you are an adult and as such you should contribute. As somebody above said, it should be for your own sense of pride if nothing else.

I can't remember what I gave my parents. I think it was just a token amount. Anything up to 1/3 of their salary seems reasonable though.

i used to charge my eldest 1/3 of his wages - this means if his wages change - the amount changes proportionally.

if you would like - you could save this up and give it back to them as a deposit or something when they move out - this was always my intention - but i spent it

How many in the family? if it is only the two of you and she is working... split the food bill. It may sound mean if you are earning far more than her but don't forget you are paying for the acommodation and services.

We were 3 siblings, my parents asked us to pay the service we abused used more. It was a permanent agreement, not changing month by month, mine was the electricity (I'm a night owl), my younger sister was in charge of the phone, and the older one of the gas. If something was needed at the house, anyone would go and get it and pay for it from their own purse be it food, house maintenance stuff, etc.

at least enough to cover her food and a contribution towards the bills

but not so much that she can't afford to save towards getting a place of her own.

I dunno, £250-300 per month?

Nooka - I think you hit the nail on the head actually. Me and all my friends were expected to go away to university, get used to living away from home and basically not go back again, which is exactly what happened. I hope DS will get the opportunity to do the same, but I do wonder about the impact of student fees on the choices young people make these days. I think I'm right that fewer students are choosing to move away from home, so they're not getting that taste of independence at an early age.

Dd will be leaving school in July which means that CTC and CB comes to end. If she was going to work full time rather than going on to Uni we would need her to contribute to the household as we would be losing about £60 a week which we need to live on.

When she finishes Uni and lives at home we will expect her to contribute 25% of her take home pay to the household budget. Her brothers did this when they lived at home and they were quite happy with this amount. Ds2 was unemployed at one point and receiving £40 a week so he would give us £10.

Why would she be expecting to live at home once she's finished uni? Isn't the whole point of uni to strike out on your own, both in terms of career and living arrangements?