Renting a 1 bedroom flat on £1000+ doable or not?

HappyMJ

Grenage wrote: »

I used to feed myself on £10-15 a week when I was living on my own. All home-cooked (a lot bulk), and I ate like a bloody king. That wasn't bargain-hunting, either; that was once a week off to Asda.

When my other half moved in it went from about £50 a month to £150-200 a month; not sure what happened there.

I doubt you "ate like a king". In my opinion a king would eat far too much meat and a bottle of wine for every meal. Sliced ham, bacon, sausages for breakfast, chicken, duck, turkey for lunch, red meat such as lamb or beef for dinner. Far too much meat for most people....and very expensive. They'd probably be having cook serve up a £10-£15 joint for every evening meal.

Are you female and is your other half male? Men eat much more than women. Guidelines are 2,500kcal per day for men compared to 2,000kcal per day for women with light exercise. If he's an active bloke working hard all day he'll need more calories than you just to maintain his body weight.

Grenage

HappyMJ wrote: »

I doubt you "ate like a king". In my opinion a king would eat far too much meat and a bottle of wine for every meal. Sliced ham, bacon, sausages for breakfast, chicken, duck, turkey for lunch, red meat such as lamb or beef for dinner. Far too much meat for most people....and very expensive. They'd probably be having cook serve up a £10-£15 joint for every evening meal.

Are you female and is your other half male? Men eat much more than women. Guidelines are 2,500kcal per day for men compared to 2,000kcal per day for women with light exercise. If he's an active bloke working hard all day he'll need more calories than you just to maintain his body weight.

No; I'm male, 6.5 and very active. I probably consume about 4000 calories a day. Obviously I don't eat like an actual king - I'd probably be fat, and have gout with heart complications by now.

Edit: I should have added that I'm a vegetarian, which probably goes some way to explain the difference.

HappyMJ

Grenage wrote: »

No; I'm male, 6.5 and very active. I probably consume about 4000 calories a day. Obviously I don't eat like an actual king - I'd probably be fat, and have gout with heart complications by now.

On £10-£15 a week?

Grenage

HappyMJ wrote: »

On £10-£15 a week?

I did a lot of bulk cooking, and I don't snack. I'm not saying everyone wants to eat that way, but it worked well for me. You don't have to spend a lot.

audigex

I'd say £150 is exceedingly ambitious for bills. I'd say the following are absolute minimums you can expect to pay

Council tax: £70-80
Electricity/Gas: £60-80
Water: £25-40
Broadband/Phone line: £30
TV License: £12

That's more like £200-250, and is the lower end of the numbers I saw when renting a 2 bedroom flat (one very small, unused box room)

I'd feel very, very uncomfortable allowing less than £250 a month for bills. And this doesn't include a mobile phone, fibre broadband, netflix or similar.

As for food - you're really living on £40-50 a month? Are you sure? I struggled with that as a fairly slim student 8 years ago, I struggle to believe anyone's eating on that little for a month.

If you're a truly frugal person, £1,000/month is probably just about doable with virtually no luxuries. Personally I found that I needed at least £1,200 a month to be able to live in non-shared housing, and even that was quite uncomfortable with little margin for error/unexpected costs and not a great deal of socialising.

I currently reckon on ~£800/month to live on, but my mortgage is only £310/month: the OP is looking at at least £100 more than this, and that's only including my essentials before discretionary spending... something that's easy to underestimate. Living without luxuries for a month or two is fairly easy, but most people will get pretty fed up of that after a year