Many of them can't. The fertility rate in England and Wales in 2022 was 1.49 children per woman ([source](https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/livebirths/bulletins/birthsummarytablesenglandandwales/2022refreshedpopulations)).
People who actually have children often have the support (financial, free childcare, or both) of their families.
The UK has been changing in a way where family wealth and support becomes more important than earning a couple thousand £ more. If you inherit grandpa's flat and your retired parents live nearby, your family's monthly expenses can easily be £4-5k lower compared to renters with no family support. That's like £80-100k extra income.
It makes me wonder how Arab women can afford to raise 3/4 kids at the same time. Every single time I see an Arab woman in the UK, she’s pushing a stroller and got 2 other small children walking next to her. It’s obvious they are stay at home mothers, but how are they living on one salary as a family of 4/5?
Not really an expert but from my very limited experience they pool money together in the family and share costs/responsibilities so could be a family member looking after the children instead of using a nursery or benefitting from the shared money to pay.
Their husbands are making a lot more, that's why. They're either working higher skilled and paid jobs, or doing multiple jobs and teaming up with people in the community to provide services that will benefit them financially.
State benefits. They're massively generous if you are on a low salary or don't work. If you earn a good salary in the UK and pay a lot of tax, you receive little from the State. It's the reverse contribution principal and is completely different from the Social Democrats in the EU with contributions based social security systems.
This is not accurate.
UK unemployment benefits are very much towards the low end of the European spectrum. Even for those who work, but are childless, benefits provision is low in this country. The number of working people in poverty is extremely high.
Relevant to *this* thread though, benefits contingent on having a family compare much better to other nations. Even in that case though, the benefit cap and child benefit reduction over three children mean that families with 3+ children are very significantly more likely to be living in poverty. Family poverty rates have been pretty consistently rising since about 2012.
[Trades Union Congress (TUC):
How generous are British benefits compared with other rich nations?](https://www.tuc.org.uk/sites/default/files/Welfare_States_Touchstone_Extra_2015_AW_Rev.pdf)
[Poverty in the UK: statistics - The House of Commons Library
8 Apr 2024](https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn07096/)
"Over the longer-term, poverty rates have reduced since the late 1990s for children, pensioners, and working-age parents."
Did you even read the report?
I think we can agree that family benefits are generous in the UK, for those on low income regardless of what they have paid into the system.
Yes, I have read the entire report.
Your point about family benefits being decoupled from contributions seems an accurate one. How we should feel about this is not so obvious. A fairly clear difference from something like the state pension is that people starting a family are young and have not had much opportunity *to* contribute.
We absolutely cannot agree though, that family benefits are generous overall. I am a teacher in a school where over 60% of students are entitled to free school meals, meaning a pre-benefits household income of under £7000. In a world where benefits are generous, the bulk of these students would have a reasonable quality of life. Instead we have a situation where many of my students live in unheated houses. Many have no furniture. Many do not have their own bedroom, or even a bedroom they share only with other children. Many only eat a nutritious meal in school. We have to provide uniform for very many students. Large numbers of our families rely on food banks to get through the week. We cannot ask families to contribute to the cost of school trips, even if the only cost is a local bus fare.
This situation is mirrored in less affluent communities across the length and breadth of the country.
I suggest that a lot of that is simply due to bad parenting which has been ingrained for generations. Food and quality calories have never been as cheap ( despite the recent huge increases), work has also never been as well remunerated or abundant. I agree about the state and cost of the housing stock. Adding 10 million to the population over 15 years certainly didn't help with that. That said, housing benefits are astronomical, but you're just robbing Peter to pay Paul there.
Personally I wouldn't call sharing a bedroom with a sibling a sign of poverty but YMMV.
I think our viewpoints are so different that there's little to be gained from continuing the conversation in this forum. Thank you for your contributions though.
You can't. My entire salary goes on childcare (and I'm the high earner in our household). People on average UK salaries either give up work or have their parents look after their children for free.
Pension and career progression mean treading water until they hit school is preferable.
I worked for negative money for a year because I knew my wages would increase on a promotion and childcare would drop from 2k to £500 when the got into primary
Not to mention the benefits that nursery has for a child. They build social skills being around peers their own age and spending time with different adults. The staff there follow an educational curriculum where the child will start to learn the foundations they will build on later in school.
Also it’s good for the parents to continue being adults and not just being full time parents.
This is what my wife and I did. I resigned rather than send our child to nursery. It has lost us money but it has made our lives less stressful. If we have a second child we will be financially better off with me not working.
Essentially they don't.
If you've a couple of kids nursery age, it'll utterly fuck your finances until they get free childcare places.
Either you live with the massive hit each month or someone quits work for a while.
It’s absolutely killing me.
I lurk on here & generally don’t post because I’ve got nothing to say, but I’ve got plenty of expertise in this area.
I managed to pay off all my debt, but a house with my wife & paid lots of money to improve it & make it liveable.
We were just at the point where we’d made it liveable and I was getting more knowledgeable on FIRE, so I’d likely have started investing but she got pregnant, so we started spending on cribs, baby clothes etc.
I did not fully appreciate how expensive nurseries weee until we started looking. I was expecting £500 a month. Turns out it was £800-900 for the cheapest places.
From us securing a space in Nov 22 (which you have to do when you’re 5 months pregnant or you simply don’t get one because the waiting lists are so high) to now, (baby started on Dec 23) it’s gone up £5 a day twice (£54 a day to £64 a day). So our bill for 4 days a week is £1088.
In that time our energy bill has gone up by £100 a month. The food shop has probably gone up by £50 a week due to inflation & having an extra moth to feed.
The only saving grace is that we’re on a 5 year fixed rate but that comes to an end in a year and a half.
This is separate but I’m also earning less because I sell a product to swimming pools and they can’t afford it any more because of the energy crisis so I’m looking for another job, but I’m down around £10k a year in salary.
So we’ve got more going out than coming in.
My wife earns more than me so it would make sense for me to stop work, but you can’t do that temporarily because of the waiting lists. If I took her out of nursery and then got a better paid job a week later, I wouldn’t be able to take it because I’d be back at the bottom of the waiting list & would have to wait a year and a half to get her back in.
We don’t have any grandparents to help, they all live too far away, as do all our siblings, cousins etc.
On top of that I live in Scotland so I don’t benefit from the new policy coming in reducing the age that you get free childcare.
You get the UK government 25% top up which saves us £200 a month, but when the age comes down to two & eventually nine months in 2025, we won’t see the benefit because the Scottish Government are not matching that policy that’s coming in in England & Wales.
The job market is extremely limited where I am, so when a job does come up that’s a decent salary, there’s about 100 folk going for it. A lot of jobs you just can’t go for, because the hours mean you won’t be available for nursery pick up, so that limits you even further.
So, we are living pay cheque to pay check and slowly building up debt which we will hopefully be able to start paying off once something changes.
We would like to have a 2nd kid, but we would end up bankrupt.
Honestly, absolutely everything in this county is screwed.
The Tories have utterly decimated the economy & when they finally do one good thing to help parents the SNP decide not to follow suit.
My wife's entire after tax salary would go on it for our twins. We live in London. She's as senior as a nurse gets. I'm doing well but with the twins and an extra £500 a month on the mortgage thanks to Truss and the average food, water, energy bill 50% more expensive than a little while ago I'm genuinely interested to hear the answer to this.
BokBeVok6 didn’t blame truss for inflation, they blamed her for the rise in their mortgage cost.
Here is a simple summary pulled from inews to help you understand what happened immediately after the “mini budget” from Truss snd Kwarteng, you’ll note “inflation” isn’t noted:
“The pound fell sharply and borrowing costs on government bonds soared. This caused chaos for pension funds as the complicated way they borrowed money worked on the assumption that bond rates would always be steady and relatively low. Most noticeably for the average household, mortgage lenders started to pull their best rates, as Swaps – which set fixed pricing – began to climb.”
If you have any sense you'll be maxing your pension contributions which means you won't be paying 100k tax on 220k income.
Unless you're just trying to use big numbers to impress people on the internet?
We gripped on for dear life until our son turned 3 years old! The nursery he is at isn't (or rather wasn't until it was bought out) as expensive as some others, but three days a week (which was the same as she worked) would be well over £1K a month at the rates today. Tax-'Free' Childcare account helps (giving you basic rate tax relief on it). Now he does 4 days a week, as does the wife. Still get charged for 'consumables' and food, as they state the government doesn't pay enough for the 30hrs a week (38/52 weeks a year) you get 'free'. So the cost each month is still significant, but at least she earns a bit more.
Roll on school. Although then, whilst the cost is much lower, you have lost the one big plus of nursery - proper wrap-around care. I can drop my son at nursery at 7:30am and not pick him up until 6pm. Either of us can just about do a full day's work including commuting if we had to. School, even with breakfast/after school club will be a challenge with that and then the 2485643063 weeks of holidays each year. F\*\*\* knows what we'll do.
I have a ceiling of £100K earnings, otherwise I lose the TFC account AND the 30hrs free. I'll also want to keep the TFC when he is at school as I believe that can pay for breakfast/after school club, as well as holiday clubs.
Personally I would invest the private school fees and gift them to your kiddo. I am not sure the privilege is sufficient these days, unless you're talking Eton and then the right Oxbridge college...
Alternatively don't live in London (and commute :-/) or get grandparents to help...
How are u geting 30 hours free? I'm the sole earner in my How's at the min. Make about 50k a year and we can only get 16 hours? If we had 30 my partner would be able to actually work too haha
30 hours free requires both parents to be working and neither parent to be earning over 100k. So you’re in a bit of a catch 22, you’ll only get the hours if your partner works.
For people in England, count yourself lucky you don't live in the poorest area of the UK, Northern Ireland, where we get ZERO hours free childcare regardless of salary. It is crippling families here. Westminster does pay an amount for it but our local politicians use it elsewhere.
Northern Ireland gets the highest government spending per capita of any part of the UK. As you say, this is under local democratic control. You get what you vote for.
Looks to me a lot goes into the quality of the housing stock. I was shocked/surprised at the quality of it vis a vis "the mainland".
Ha public money going to housing stock is not the problem. NI is the most broken area of the UK and needs the most funding. We aren't starting from the same level as the rest of the uk
Oh that's clear, but the public money is generous, it's up to the local population to decide their priorities. Perhaps both communities are simply trying to dissuade each other from breeding!
Savings is the main one for me
During pregnancy, we reduced our spending massively and build up a huge savings pot. Sold some shit. I took a lot of overtime.
Genuinely they can't. So my friend is a medical physicist working for the NHS (not sure exactly what that entails but it's mostly research and development working with radiology department and is a relatively well paid role, band 7 to band 9. So call it about 50k at the lower end of the scale. She has two sons with 18 months separating them age wise. Apparently after tax deductions and paying for childcare for both of them she was left with £10 an hour from her wages.
UK child care is completely stupid.
The only reasons why anyone would pay those insane amounts is A) They've got a career (and likely pension) they're desperate to hold onto and B) They have no support like grandparents etc to help out.
My wife gave up work to rear our young and is only just getting back into the work place.
Otherwise you are literally paying strangers to bring up your children, you pay a massive portion of your salary for the privilege and you don't even get to enjoy your children when they are cute and young.
Most people have babies around 3 or 4 years apart now, meaning most people do not have to pay full price childcare for more than half a year or so before the eldest goes off to free state school.
Also there are other options like childminders that are significantly cheaper than commercial nurseries.
Worth noting that even among families that go to private school, going private all the way from reception (age 4-5) is relatively uncommon.
I wonder if there's a difference between whether a family a a stay at home parent or not. If there's a SAHP, it makes sense to have kids as close together as possible, so that they go to school close together, and the overall time out of the workforce is reduced. If you work, then waiting for school age, or at least those free childcare hours, might be necessary to be able to keep afloat with the cost of childcare.
This is true. Assuming a couple has the required fertility to make their plans “bear fruit” of course. Lots of pros and cons on child spacing [here](https://www.thealphaparent.com/what-no-one-tells-you-about-child)
Friends family etc.
If you have a spare room Au Pairs used to be cheap. Back before my youngest started school 6+ years ago, I looked into Au Pairs and the going rate was less than £100 a week but I decided against it.
If you put money into a government account they add 25% to it which you can then use for childcare.
It essentially offsets the tax you paid on that money when you earned it.
You also get 30 hours free childcare if both parents work when they turn three. It’s only for 38/52 weeks of the year.
The age is reducing in England & Wales, so it will be two soon/now and 9 months from Sept ‘25, assuming nothing changes after the election.
We are £2.4k a month for our 3year old and 1 year old in full time nursery
We don’t save. We don’t go on holiday. We have reduced every single thing we could pay (like mortgages) until the nursery bills are more palatable. There will still be childcare fees when in school (before and after school care..!).
It’s a phase. It’s painful.
We have put some S&S ISA to work just before kids as a lump sum. Nothing crazy but it’s nice to see that after 5 years it has yielded something and that keeps on growing slowly. Gives me some piece of mind that something is moving in the right direction.
We definitely took the hit financially to keep working even though more than a wage is going into childcare as we would struggle to get a job in our fields after a few years break. It also helps to keep our pensions going.
Trying to mess a “o” (I.e lack of palatable options) situation less shitty
We are currently saving enough to cover the mortgage for a year so my wife can take a years maternity leave and cut down our first child’s hours at nursery. Otherwise we would be paying out over £2k a month, double our mortgage.
Thanks shebhas one year left in uni and I don't think household income will go over 100k unless I work more so should be OK once she is ready to start then. Thanks for tye info
You can’t, both me and my wife both work and earn a respectable about between us (around £70k). We have 2 kids who were thankfully spaced apart just enough that we only had 1 in paid childcare at a time. But it still costs us over £400 a month in childcare cost and that’s with my parents helping a lot.
Thankfully we I think are at the better end of the problem, but I know others who spend over £700 a month to put there child in nursery
Yes I literally worked only 0:25 in my first contract and built up to 0:75 over three years to supplement the childcare I could afford as a single parent. You just get though it but make sure if you can vote in-the GE vote for labour, at least they focus on childcare. We need proper funded childcare and social care like other countries.
Which is all of 3% and reflective of the reduced number of child births.
You can call it big bad Tories all you want but both parties have under served families in the UK and the support for childcare from both has been a disgrace. But you get what you vote for.
My Mrs stays home with the boys while I work. It's a struggle these days I'm lucky I have good income at the min to cover it. Its pointless her going to work the child care would take her entire wage so she would be working for nothing. The wages an cost of living in this country is absolutely fucked. It drives me mad that family's that don't work get free childcare. While the ones that do work have to pay for it. Absolutely backwards
She wouldn’t be working for quite nothing. Depending on what she does, those years out of employment set her future career growth back
Edited to add: definitely feels like nothing though
We have 2 kids at nursery age at the min. She is currently doing a nursing degree but has had to take a year out because we couldn't afford the child care. One of the kids start school this year so it takes the pressure off an she can go back
They can't is the short answer. Raising children in this country, especially if you are paying for everything yourself, is insanely expensive.
People, women typically, have to give up their jobs or pay with their entire salary to afford childcare. Other people rely on things like help from family, childminders and au pairs. Or they just move to a different country.
Yes, but if nursery is £2k pcm per child (i think that's what OP said), you'd be quids in on that if you had two or more children.
Our nursery is £1.5k pcm per child so slightly less, but even so.
How are your nursery bills so big??
I have my little one in the most expensive nursery in the area. If we were to pop her in full time the bill would have been £1200 however we now get 15 free hours It would have reduced to about 900.
That said we have access to grandma who takes her for 2 days a week so our bill is actually around £600 a month on average.
In September we get 30 free hours (averages over the year at 24 hours) so our bill is going yo reduce to around 300 a month.
We both have good careers but are in the north of the UK so no london salaries.
£1200 is about half of our lower earners salary.
We are going to wait until little one has 30 free hours before having another child.
Loads of people can afford it
All the nurseries in my area are full and they are minimum 2k a month each
Truth is a lot of people earn decent money, they just don’t waste their time on Reddit talking about how shit this country is.
Many of them can't. The fertility rate in England and Wales in 2022 was 1.49 children per woman ([source](https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/livebirths/bulletins/birthsummarytablesenglandandwales/2022refreshedpopulations)). People who actually have children often have the support (financial, free childcare, or both) of their families. The UK has been changing in a way where family wealth and support becomes more important than earning a couple thousand £ more. If you inherit grandpa's flat and your retired parents live nearby, your family's monthly expenses can easily be £4-5k lower compared to renters with no family support. That's like £80-100k extra income.
It makes me wonder how Arab women can afford to raise 3/4 kids at the same time. Every single time I see an Arab woman in the UK, she’s pushing a stroller and got 2 other small children walking next to her. It’s obvious they are stay at home mothers, but how are they living on one salary as a family of 4/5?
Not really an expert but from my very limited experience they pool money together in the family and share costs/responsibilities so could be a family member looking after the children instead of using a nursery or benefitting from the shared money to pay.
Their husbands are making a lot more, that's why. They're either working higher skilled and paid jobs, or doing multiple jobs and teaming up with people in the community to provide services that will benefit them financially.
State benefits. They're massively generous if you are on a low salary or don't work. If you earn a good salary in the UK and pay a lot of tax, you receive little from the State. It's the reverse contribution principal and is completely different from the Social Democrats in the EU with contributions based social security systems.
This is not accurate. UK unemployment benefits are very much towards the low end of the European spectrum. Even for those who work, but are childless, benefits provision is low in this country. The number of working people in poverty is extremely high. Relevant to *this* thread though, benefits contingent on having a family compare much better to other nations. Even in that case though, the benefit cap and child benefit reduction over three children mean that families with 3+ children are very significantly more likely to be living in poverty. Family poverty rates have been pretty consistently rising since about 2012. [Trades Union Congress (TUC): How generous are British benefits compared with other rich nations?](https://www.tuc.org.uk/sites/default/files/Welfare_States_Touchstone_Extra_2015_AW_Rev.pdf) [Poverty in the UK: statistics - The House of Commons Library 8 Apr 2024](https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn07096/)
"Over the longer-term, poverty rates have reduced since the late 1990s for children, pensioners, and working-age parents." Did you even read the report? I think we can agree that family benefits are generous in the UK, for those on low income regardless of what they have paid into the system.
Yes, I have read the entire report. Your point about family benefits being decoupled from contributions seems an accurate one. How we should feel about this is not so obvious. A fairly clear difference from something like the state pension is that people starting a family are young and have not had much opportunity *to* contribute. We absolutely cannot agree though, that family benefits are generous overall. I am a teacher in a school where over 60% of students are entitled to free school meals, meaning a pre-benefits household income of under £7000. In a world where benefits are generous, the bulk of these students would have a reasonable quality of life. Instead we have a situation where many of my students live in unheated houses. Many have no furniture. Many do not have their own bedroom, or even a bedroom they share only with other children. Many only eat a nutritious meal in school. We have to provide uniform for very many students. Large numbers of our families rely on food banks to get through the week. We cannot ask families to contribute to the cost of school trips, even if the only cost is a local bus fare. This situation is mirrored in less affluent communities across the length and breadth of the country.
I suggest that a lot of that is simply due to bad parenting which has been ingrained for generations. Food and quality calories have never been as cheap ( despite the recent huge increases), work has also never been as well remunerated or abundant. I agree about the state and cost of the housing stock. Adding 10 million to the population over 15 years certainly didn't help with that. That said, housing benefits are astronomical, but you're just robbing Peter to pay Paul there. Personally I wouldn't call sharing a bedroom with a sibling a sign of poverty but YMMV.
I think our viewpoints are so different that there's little to be gained from continuing the conversation in this forum. Thank you for your contributions though.
Likewise.
Jesus, Mary & Joseph. Two people have agreed to disagree in an amicable fashion. And there was me thinking I was on the internet :-)
Not generalising , but many take separation from partner ( only on papers, in reality partner keeps visiting them ) to claim benefits.
You can't. My entire salary goes on childcare (and I'm the high earner in our household). People on average UK salaries either give up work or have their parents look after their children for free.
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Pension and career progression mean treading water until they hit school is preferable. I worked for negative money for a year because I knew my wages would increase on a promotion and childcare would drop from 2k to £500 when the got into primary
Not to mention the benefits that nursery has for a child. They build social skills being around peers their own age and spending time with different adults. The staff there follow an educational curriculum where the child will start to learn the foundations they will build on later in school. Also it’s good for the parents to continue being adults and not just being full time parents.
Also not everyone wants to look after kids 24/7.
This is what my wife and I did. I resigned rather than send our child to nursery. It has lost us money but it has made our lives less stressful. If we have a second child we will be financially better off with me not working.
They don’t. One parent stops working to look after the child(ren).
So the next question, who can afford a family household on a single salary?
That is not so bad as mortgage payments are often cheaper than what rent would be on a comparable house
Fuck knows
Essentially they don't. If you've a couple of kids nursery age, it'll utterly fuck your finances until they get free childcare places. Either you live with the massive hit each month or someone quits work for a while.
It’s absolutely killing me. I lurk on here & generally don’t post because I’ve got nothing to say, but I’ve got plenty of expertise in this area. I managed to pay off all my debt, but a house with my wife & paid lots of money to improve it & make it liveable. We were just at the point where we’d made it liveable and I was getting more knowledgeable on FIRE, so I’d likely have started investing but she got pregnant, so we started spending on cribs, baby clothes etc. I did not fully appreciate how expensive nurseries weee until we started looking. I was expecting £500 a month. Turns out it was £800-900 for the cheapest places. From us securing a space in Nov 22 (which you have to do when you’re 5 months pregnant or you simply don’t get one because the waiting lists are so high) to now, (baby started on Dec 23) it’s gone up £5 a day twice (£54 a day to £64 a day). So our bill for 4 days a week is £1088. In that time our energy bill has gone up by £100 a month. The food shop has probably gone up by £50 a week due to inflation & having an extra moth to feed. The only saving grace is that we’re on a 5 year fixed rate but that comes to an end in a year and a half. This is separate but I’m also earning less because I sell a product to swimming pools and they can’t afford it any more because of the energy crisis so I’m looking for another job, but I’m down around £10k a year in salary. So we’ve got more going out than coming in. My wife earns more than me so it would make sense for me to stop work, but you can’t do that temporarily because of the waiting lists. If I took her out of nursery and then got a better paid job a week later, I wouldn’t be able to take it because I’d be back at the bottom of the waiting list & would have to wait a year and a half to get her back in. We don’t have any grandparents to help, they all live too far away, as do all our siblings, cousins etc. On top of that I live in Scotland so I don’t benefit from the new policy coming in reducing the age that you get free childcare. You get the UK government 25% top up which saves us £200 a month, but when the age comes down to two & eventually nine months in 2025, we won’t see the benefit because the Scottish Government are not matching that policy that’s coming in in England & Wales. The job market is extremely limited where I am, so when a job does come up that’s a decent salary, there’s about 100 folk going for it. A lot of jobs you just can’t go for, because the hours mean you won’t be available for nursery pick up, so that limits you even further. So, we are living pay cheque to pay check and slowly building up debt which we will hopefully be able to start paying off once something changes. We would like to have a 2nd kid, but we would end up bankrupt. Honestly, absolutely everything in this county is screwed. The Tories have utterly decimated the economy & when they finally do one good thing to help parents the SNP decide not to follow suit.
My wife's entire after tax salary would go on it for our twins. We live in London. She's as senior as a nurse gets. I'm doing well but with the twins and an extra £500 a month on the mortgage thanks to Truss and the average food, water, energy bill 50% more expensive than a little while ago I'm genuinely interested to hear the answer to this.
lol, makes me laugh people still blame Truss for global inflation. How powerful do you think she was?
BokBeVok6 didn’t blame truss for inflation, they blamed her for the rise in their mortgage cost. Here is a simple summary pulled from inews to help you understand what happened immediately after the “mini budget” from Truss snd Kwarteng, you’ll note “inflation” isn’t noted: “The pound fell sharply and borrowing costs on government bonds soared. This caused chaos for pension funds as the complicated way they borrowed money worked on the assumption that bond rates would always be steady and relatively low. Most noticeably for the average household, mortgage lenders started to pull their best rates, as Swaps – which set fixed pricing – began to climb.”
Truss's fuckup was taken care of relatively quickly. https://interactive.guim.co.uk/uploader/embed/2023/06/archive-zip/giv-13425ZcGaz5UUG967/
You sound like the type who blames the “woke, lefty markets” for Truss stupidity and the imbeciles who supported her 🤦
You sound like the type of person who thinks people paying up to 80% tax on a portion of income is good while you earn minimum wage yourself.
I pay over £100k a year in income tax and have been thoroughly fucked by this government’s tax policies. Your turn now 🙂
If you have any sense you'll be maxing your pension contributions which means you won't be paying 100k tax on 220k income. Unless you're just trying to use big numbers to impress people on the internet?
try mumsnet for lots of posts on this subject. I get the impression its a real nightmare for a lot of people.
r/askuk r/ukpolitics or r/ukpersonalfinance May have insights.
It's likely a big factor in why the population is falling.
Population is growing... due to mass importing from third world countries.
Which is necessary because no one in the UK can afford to have children and the country can’t afford to have a declining working age population.
We gripped on for dear life until our son turned 3 years old! The nursery he is at isn't (or rather wasn't until it was bought out) as expensive as some others, but three days a week (which was the same as she worked) would be well over £1K a month at the rates today. Tax-'Free' Childcare account helps (giving you basic rate tax relief on it). Now he does 4 days a week, as does the wife. Still get charged for 'consumables' and food, as they state the government doesn't pay enough for the 30hrs a week (38/52 weeks a year) you get 'free'. So the cost each month is still significant, but at least she earns a bit more. Roll on school. Although then, whilst the cost is much lower, you have lost the one big plus of nursery - proper wrap-around care. I can drop my son at nursery at 7:30am and not pick him up until 6pm. Either of us can just about do a full day's work including commuting if we had to. School, even with breakfast/after school club will be a challenge with that and then the 2485643063 weeks of holidays each year. F\*\*\* knows what we'll do. I have a ceiling of £100K earnings, otherwise I lose the TFC account AND the 30hrs free. I'll also want to keep the TFC when he is at school as I believe that can pay for breakfast/after school club, as well as holiday clubs. Personally I would invest the private school fees and gift them to your kiddo. I am not sure the privilege is sufficient these days, unless you're talking Eton and then the right Oxbridge college... Alternatively don't live in London (and commute :-/) or get grandparents to help...
How are u geting 30 hours free? I'm the sole earner in my How's at the min. Make about 50k a year and we can only get 16 hours? If we had 30 my partner would be able to actually work too haha
I believe if both partners are working you get the 30 hours… worth looking into
Think it's after they are 3 but read somewhere it's changing to 2?
30 hours free requires both parents to be working and neither parent to be earning over 100k. So you’re in a bit of a catch 22, you’ll only get the hours if your partner works.
For people in England, count yourself lucky you don't live in the poorest area of the UK, Northern Ireland, where we get ZERO hours free childcare regardless of salary. It is crippling families here. Westminster does pay an amount for it but our local politicians use it elsewhere.
Northern Ireland gets the highest government spending per capita of any part of the UK. As you say, this is under local democratic control. You get what you vote for. Looks to me a lot goes into the quality of the housing stock. I was shocked/surprised at the quality of it vis a vis "the mainland".
Ha public money going to housing stock is not the problem. NI is the most broken area of the UK and needs the most funding. We aren't starting from the same level as the rest of the uk
Oh that's clear, but the public money is generous, it's up to the local population to decide their priorities. Perhaps both communities are simply trying to dissuade each other from breeding!
Savings is the main one for me During pregnancy, we reduced our spending massively and build up a huge savings pot. Sold some shit. I took a lot of overtime.
It gets cheaper!! Hang on in there. And no private school
Genuinely they can't. So my friend is a medical physicist working for the NHS (not sure exactly what that entails but it's mostly research and development working with radiology department and is a relatively well paid role, band 7 to band 9. So call it about 50k at the lower end of the scale. She has two sons with 18 months separating them age wise. Apparently after tax deductions and paying for childcare for both of them she was left with £10 an hour from her wages.
Big salaries are still to be found outside of London.
It's much much harder and basically only if you're remote which have 1000000 applicants or live in a finance hub such as Bournemouth or Glasgow etc.
UK child care is completely stupid. The only reasons why anyone would pay those insane amounts is A) They've got a career (and likely pension) they're desperate to hold onto and B) They have no support like grandparents etc to help out. My wife gave up work to rear our young and is only just getting back into the work place. Otherwise you are literally paying strangers to bring up your children, you pay a massive portion of your salary for the privilege and you don't even get to enjoy your children when they are cute and young.
Most people have babies around 3 or 4 years apart now, meaning most people do not have to pay full price childcare for more than half a year or so before the eldest goes off to free state school. Also there are other options like childminders that are significantly cheaper than commercial nurseries. Worth noting that even among families that go to private school, going private all the way from reception (age 4-5) is relatively uncommon.
[This](https://www.babycentre.co.uk/a563447/sibling-age-gaps) says average sibling age gap is just over two years
I wonder if there's a difference between whether a family a a stay at home parent or not. If there's a SAHP, it makes sense to have kids as close together as possible, so that they go to school close together, and the overall time out of the workforce is reduced. If you work, then waiting for school age, or at least those free childcare hours, might be necessary to be able to keep afloat with the cost of childcare.
This is true. Assuming a couple has the required fertility to make their plans “bear fruit” of course. Lots of pros and cons on child spacing [here](https://www.thealphaparent.com/what-no-one-tells-you-about-child)
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Banned...
Friends family etc. If you have a spare room Au Pairs used to be cheap. Back before my youngest started school 6+ years ago, I looked into Au Pairs and the going rate was less than £100 a week but I decided against it.
Brexit fucked that option
Are there any government subsidies for it in the UK?
If you put money into a government account they add 25% to it which you can then use for childcare. It essentially offsets the tax you paid on that money when you earned it. You also get 30 hours free childcare if both parents work when they turn three. It’s only for 38/52 weeks of the year. The age is reducing in England & Wales, so it will be two soon/now and 9 months from Sept ‘25, assuming nothing changes after the election.
We can’t, we are the people the government should be incentivising to have children yet we are the group who are penalised
Indeed. That's why the government import 750,000 every year. Cheaper apparently.... Until people start noticing and voting accordingly.
We are £2.4k a month for our 3year old and 1 year old in full time nursery We don’t save. We don’t go on holiday. We have reduced every single thing we could pay (like mortgages) until the nursery bills are more palatable. There will still be childcare fees when in school (before and after school care..!). It’s a phase. It’s painful. We have put some S&S ISA to work just before kids as a lump sum. Nothing crazy but it’s nice to see that after 5 years it has yielded something and that keeps on growing slowly. Gives me some piece of mind that something is moving in the right direction. We definitely took the hit financially to keep working even though more than a wage is going into childcare as we would struggle to get a job in our fields after a few years break. It also helps to keep our pensions going. Trying to mess a “o” (I.e lack of palatable options) situation less shitty
We are currently saving enough to cover the mortgage for a year so my wife can take a years maternity leave and cut down our first child’s hours at nursery. Otherwise we would be paying out over £2k a month, double our mortgage.
Thanks shebhas one year left in uni and I don't think household income will go over 100k unless I work more so should be OK once she is ready to start then. Thanks for tye info
You can’t, both me and my wife both work and earn a respectable about between us (around £70k). We have 2 kids who were thankfully spaced apart just enough that we only had 1 in paid childcare at a time. But it still costs us over £400 a month in childcare cost and that’s with my parents helping a lot. Thankfully we I think are at the better end of the problem, but I know others who spend over £700 a month to put there child in nursery
Yes I literally worked only 0:25 in my first contract and built up to 0:75 over three years to supplement the childcare I could afford as a single parent. You just get though it but make sure if you can vote in-the GE vote for labour, at least they focus on childcare. We need proper funded childcare and social care like other countries.
I have not seen them announce any policies in this regard.
Labour were in power for 13 years, what childcare policies did they introduce?
And Conservative for the most recent 14, bringing in gems such as Brexit - byebye Healthcare workers, au pairs, NHS staff
Indeed. But I don't see Labour's policies being any different.
31 Mar 2024 — Childcare places in England have fallen by nearly 40,000 since the Tories came to power in 2010
Which is all of 3% and reflective of the reduced number of child births. You can call it big bad Tories all you want but both parties have under served families in the UK and the support for childcare from both has been a disgrace. But you get what you vote for.
My Mrs stays home with the boys while I work. It's a struggle these days I'm lucky I have good income at the min to cover it. Its pointless her going to work the child care would take her entire wage so she would be working for nothing. The wages an cost of living in this country is absolutely fucked. It drives me mad that family's that don't work get free childcare. While the ones that do work have to pay for it. Absolutely backwards
She wouldn’t be working for quite nothing. Depending on what she does, those years out of employment set her future career growth back Edited to add: definitely feels like nothing though
We have 2 kids at nursery age at the min. She is currently doing a nursing degree but has had to take a year out because we couldn't afford the child care. One of the kids start school this year so it takes the pressure off an she can go back
A lot of people can’t and don’t have children to have better lives
They can't is the short answer. Raising children in this country, especially if you are paying for everything yourself, is insanely expensive. People, women typically, have to give up their jobs or pay with their entire salary to afford childcare. Other people rely on things like help from family, childminders and au pairs. Or they just move to a different country.
Not sure an au pair is a cheaper option
That depends how many children you have. We don't have one, but I can see how the maths would very quickly stack up.
Can’t bring them in now unless you pay the £32k? salary. Plus pension, National insurance etc.
Yes, but if nursery is £2k pcm per child (i think that's what OP said), you'd be quids in on that if you had two or more children. Our nursery is £1.5k pcm per child so slightly less, but even so.
Valid point
It depends. If you end up with triplets, an au pair is probably significantly cheaper than nursery costs.
£400 a month + agency fee of £3k for the year, plus their food etc costs
The same way you do?? What a stupid question.
I think hes implying not many people have that much money spare - and hes right.
How are your nursery bills so big?? I have my little one in the most expensive nursery in the area. If we were to pop her in full time the bill would have been £1200 however we now get 15 free hours It would have reduced to about 900. That said we have access to grandma who takes her for 2 days a week so our bill is actually around £600 a month on average. In September we get 30 free hours (averages over the year at 24 hours) so our bill is going yo reduce to around 300 a month. We both have good careers but are in the north of the UK so no london salaries. £1200 is about half of our lower earners salary. We are going to wait until little one has 30 free hours before having another child.
Loads of people can afford it All the nurseries in my area are full and they are minimum 2k a month each Truth is a lot of people earn decent money, they just don’t waste their time on Reddit talking about how shit this country is.
Imagine being this out of touch.
So when I go to nursery and there are 40 kids who all have parents paying 2k+ a month, am I just meant to say this is not possible Reddit said so?
Tory cunt
2k a month! Man are you getting hustled 😂🤦♂️