How do you finance private school?

Lunar_Eclipse

silvercar wrote: »

When it was time to choose a secondary I was determined to look at all the options with an open mind. Having looked around I was pleasantly surprised at the variety available.

You were lucky. For us, all the variety is in the private sector. We are only in catchment for one state school, although I am sure this is fairly common. There is a girls selective state school I have found about an hour and a half away that would be an excellent choice, but not practical in terms of its location. Additionally, we would have to jeopardise our chances with our local school if we put this as our first choice on the application form, which we would need to do to be considered for entry. And I can't afford to take that risk.

Whilst I think it's great to choose the best school for each child, they would need to be from the same sector; I could not privately educate one of my children and not the other. They may see it as favouritism at some point in the future. Logic aside perhaps, but that's sometimes the way families and love are. Having said that, I know many people do this. In fact I was speaking to a friend only this morning who may do just this, daughter into highly academic girls school (probably via scholarship), sons to the local secondary school.

Milky_Mocha

Lunar_Eclipse wrote: »

Well, are you sure you have your Maths right? Current income £7.5k/month, would become £5k if you stopped working completely. I think you might have deducted your income twice since you then also mentioned income dropping to £3k, which I didn't understand. Additionally you could always work part time to boost the family income.

If we had an income of 130k, we could easily afford to finance private education for our two children. But people have differing financial circumstances and priorities.

The drop to 3k is due to deduction of 2k mortgage. Although mortgage drops soon, interest rates will no doubt begin to climb again at some point over the next 3 years or so. If I did some serious prioritisation we could probably afford it - hubby and I would have to take out multiple redundancy insurance policies as loss of a job would be devastating... I had my eye on a school called Woodlands in Brentwood as their website and word of mouth so far is really really good but the state schools in the area appear to be outstanding.

Another scary thing is the yearly rise in fees. At a point the fees go up to approx 5k per term. How do some people do it???

Do the childcare salary sacrifice employee schemes apply to private education, I wonder?