Only freedom will do

smallholdingsister

How do you spend £300 a month attending weddings?

hiddenshadow

MORTGAGE: £500 on their four-bedroom end-of-terrace home.
UTILITY BILLS (including gas, electric, home phone, mobile phones, broadband, insurance and council tax): £1,180.
CAR COSTS (inc. petrol, tax and insurance): £600 for Mini Countryman and Kia Sportage.
PUBLIC TRANSPORT: £100.

How on earth do you have a £500/mo mortgage combined with £1,180/mo utility bills?! Our non-mortgage regular bills are £447.67 a month, including am@zon prime for video streaming.

I bet if they swapped the car/public transport priorities they could get around for < £500/mo total. < £300 probably if they sold a car.

CAR COSTS: £370 for a Citroen Picasso and Renault Megane.
PUBLIC TRANSPORT: £190 for a rail season ticket.

If you live in Brentwood, you don't need 2 cars AND a rail season ticket. Crazy. "Some people might wonder why we need two cars, but they’re essential for us to be able to get to work and nursery." Really...if you rent you should be able to move closer to one or both of those places and ditch at least one car.

I also love the justification of £100/mo Sky because "we never go to the cinema". We never go to the cinema either and we pay £7/mo for am@zon prime (plus tv licence to have freeview). There are loads of things to watch between the two of those things and it costs < £20/mo.

Anyone else notice a trend of families having 1 kid more than expected as well? Not to begrudge those kids of existence but there are ways of planning how big a family you'll have, especially if childcare is so much of your monthly costs.

smallholdingsister

Translates as "We actually planned three kids but fear criticism of that choice"....person with 3 kids posting!

mrsp1987

I thought the houses looked ghastly too. Especially that one that was being rented for £1,000 a month. Looks like one of the ex-council houses from the wrong side of the tracks in my town

hiddenshadow

smallholdingsister wrote: »

Translates as "We actually planned three kids but fear criticism of that choice"....person with 3 kids posting!

Ha! If you actually want 3 kids, go for it. But if you plan to have 3 kids and don't improve your finances as you go, I don't think you get to play the "woe is me childcare is sooo expensive" pity card...you made your bed, lie in it.

(Says the forever-childfree-and-grateful-for-it, but I'd love to rescue another dozen pets...don't do so because we don't have room and the vet bills on our 4 are manageable but sizeable. I'm consciously choosing not to add to our furry kid count as a budgeting choice. Somehow I think that choice is more acceptable when it's animals than kids though? You rarely see anyone say "well we would have loved more kids but we just couldn't afford them" even though kids are generally much more expensive than pets!)

smallholdingsister

You are right. Sorry to chat on your thread, Ed.

MMM is pretty scathing about >1 kid and >0 pets.

edinburgher

Interesting chat, will respond tomorrow, feeling a bit virusy just now 😷

choccielover

I have 1 and I'm sticking with 1. Could afford more (on paper) but reality is that we enjoy lovely holidays with 1 and sending 1 to a good school ain't cheap. So we stick at 1 because it's all we can afford when we look at what we want to "do" for that child.

Sounds selfish when I put it like that but at least I've weighed up the economies of additional children, which is more than many seem to do. If I dud want another we wouldn't do it unless we felt we could cut our cloth accordingly and still live a lifestyle that made us all happy, otherwise what's the point surely.....

pavlovs_dog

I can't speak for the primary sector but at secondary level it is normally very easy to identify which children do not have siblings. They are much more comfortable in adult company than their peers,with many often seeking it out when on residential trips. Many can often described as old before their time. A less positive aspect of sibling-free children in a predominantly wealthy catchment area is that they can be quite indulged and suffer from helicopter parenting. (There are plenty of children from larger families who suffer from helicopter parenting too, but it is shade less damaging when spread between siblings IMHO).

Personally I have loved having a sibling and would want my offspring to enjoy those bonds too. I like the idea of 3 little ones, but I suspect OH and our finances will be content with 2.

Secret_Saving_Squirrel

Hope you feel better soon Ed. As for that article, it is rubbish, just lazy journalism as those figures really don't stack up. As well, if the average income is 26500, many of those people were earning much less, so they are nowhere near being high earners. And if you can't afford the basics, including figures for gyms, hairdressers etc in your budget is just insulting the readers' intelligence.