Budgeting as a post-grad student

Mojisola

Reactive wrote: »

I've since decided to live in more reasonable accomodation at £350/month for a nice 2 bed terraced house rather than the expensive £600/month 1 bed! After sleeping on it I weighed up the pros + cons and came to the conclusion that it's not worth an extra £250/month.

This is a good decision. You now have the back-up position of being able to rent a room out if your financial position gets difficult - https://www.direct.gov.uk/en/MoneyTaxAndBenefits/Taxes/TaxOnPropertyAndRentalIncome/DG_4017804

rexmedorum

Engineering PhDs do tend to take longer than 3 years, from what I've seen. And unless you anticipate this and save some money you may find yourself in the situation where you need to work full-time to stay afloat seriously limiting your chances of ever finishing at all.

The figure you mention sounds a little high to me, are you sure it's just the living allowance and the tuation fees don't need to come out of that?

Derivative

On the bike front, if you expect to use a bike to go everywhere - you're probably best off getting a good brand second hand off ebay than going for something from Argos or the like.

£200 or £300 for a bike might seem expensive but it's better in the long run than giving up on cycling and getting the bus cause you bought a 20kg heap that's rusting and has bits falling off it.

And on the food front, eating out is not cheaper than cooking for yourself, money wise. Cooking for yourself will be less than £30pw, I would be incredibly surprised if you can eat out two meals a day for that without going to the chip shop every meal.

If you have to cycle over about 5 miles a good bike will probably save you 20mins a day compared to Tesco backwards fork MTB. Time to cook.

My hometown is "a very cheap area of Northern England" and to be honest even £350/mo sounds quite expensive for rent. That said it does depend on area.