How do you do it and is it worth it?

Okay, need some honesty and I will be too. I'm not as concerned with the cost of moving to England as I am with the cost of living in England. My hubby is a Ph.D. scientist originally from London, which means he makes decent living here (about $75/year) and I'm a writer and a graduate student (which basically makes nothing!) and we are expecting our first baby in July. Well, unfortunately scientists just don't get paid that much. At the highest he might (long shot) be offered 40 per year in pounds, but his salary could be as low as 31 per year. On our end, we're finishing paying off some credit cards (like most Americans!) and he has a small UK student loan to pay off. Plus we have three cats to transport. Anyway, the moving expenses are fearsome, but what is really worrysome is our lifestyle when we get there. Unless I get a fulltime job that can cover the cost of childcare and leave us with extra to make it worth working....calculating tax, nih, counsel tax, rent, groceries, pension, savings, utilities, transportation, and a very very small amount for misc. expenses at the minimum he would need to take home 29 pounds per year, but at an average salary of 34, he would only be taking home about 22 per year. Aiyee! How does anyone make it work? It seems that even with job skills, money to relocate and a decent wage it is impossible to get ahead, save for a house and whatnot. And yet....we live so far away from family, he misses his home country so much and it seems like we could have a greater quality of life. Opinions? Advice to make this less scary? Maybe we should just give up on the idea?

I think anywhere you can have a better quality of life is a good reason to consider a move. 

Must you live in London?
It's cheaper to live outside of London.

Honestly, I wouldn't consider London or the immediate surrounding area if I could avoid it at all.

My husband is about 8 months away from finishing his PhD and he is actively monitoring the job listings/post docs. We debated at great length his applying for a position in London. Academically, it would have been excellent. But for our family, it would have been awful, especially with a baby. So we've said 'no'.

Even by living outside of London, we calculated that money saved in rent and other expenses would be eaten up with commuting costs back into London.

I think you need to sit down and do a serious budget in a best and worst case scenario for the London area. Because, IMO, if you don't have any money left over, the better quality of life you are hoping to achieve will be much harder to attain.

Sorry to be negative, but you did ask for opinions! If we stay in the UK, we are aiming for further north where it is cheaper to live.

When you are working out tax, don't forget tax credits, which help out somewhat (an extra @£200 per month give or take), the social saftey net is better here, you will not have to pay for health and maternity care is excellent, plus there are maternity grants and other financial help for new babies. Cost of living is relative, so don't be translating £s into $s to work it out, it will seem prohibitively expensive when you do so and on a daily living basis, it is not, it all works out the same (more or less). London may be too expensive, but a young family starting out on 29-40,000 per year is not doing too badly. Really.

Where did you get the £40,000 a year figure? Salaries in London are usually higher than in other parts of the country.

Thank you all for the responses! I should have clarified a little more. My hubby is from London, but his job opportunity is in the Berkshire area. So we would be looking for something in Berkshire, probably Reading since it seems the most reasonably priced and the commute to his work would not be that far. The position in question has a salary range of up to 40,000 dependent on experience. Scientists in his particular field are paid very low in England compared to the U.S. I didn't know about the child tax credit. I used a UK Salary calculator to calculate a 34,000 pound salary (the median range for this position) and it calculated the NIH and the Tax taking into account that we were married, but not children. This is the cost of living breakdown I calculated based on living in the Berkshire area--I know it has dollar signs--but it is all meant to be in pounds:


2 Bedroom Apartment Rental: $750.00/month
Utilities: $100/month (with internet)
Council Tax: $1000 (based on 2006 figures)/year
TV Tax: 135.00 per year
Phone: $50/month
Groceries: $400/month
Bills: $300 (student loans--10 year payback plan)/month
Misc.: $100.00/month
Transportation: $150/month
Savings: $400/month
Total Yearly Cost: $32,935
Total Monthly Cost: $2,744.58

Income: 34,000/annual
Pension Contribution: 200.00/month
Income After Taxes & NIH & Pension: $22,300
Total Monthly Income: $1858.00

Are my numbers way off compared to the real cost of living outside of London? I have heard that the north is less expensive, but is that just the cost of apartments or are utilities, groceries etc. also less expensive? His commute would only be 20 or 30 minutes from Reading and it would keep us from having to buy a car--if we lived up north would transportation be an issue?

I guess what worries me is that we're basically 1,000 pounds short every month of just the basics--small savings account to eventually buy a house, small investment in retirement. There is no wiggle room at all for extra medical expenses (such as if you can't find an NIH dentist in your area or if you have special vision needs etc.), baby college saving funds or anything extra for travel or emergencies. I would consider working full-time (write now am a freelance writer/editor), but the cost of childcare compared to the salary I would earn minus taxes, transportation and the like doesn't seem to make it worth it, especially since we plan on having a second child very shortly after our first.

I guess it just seems so daunting. As you work longer at a position, surely there must be more wiggle room? Perhaps I'm just looking at the beginning numbers, but there is future potential?

I'm not in England, but in Cardiff, and those figures are definitely more expensive than what I pay here.  Of course, that's one of the reasons we stay in Cardiff.  We like the low cost of living compared to London, and we still have city benefits without being totally overwhelmed by a  massively huge city life.  We'd be able to do okay here with £30-£40K and a family, and keep in mind that the bad exchange rate that makes it sound so much more expensive works to our advantage in some ways--I'm now paying off my US student loans at twice the rate I was before.

Best of luck in your decision.  It's never easy making such big choices.  You'll find what works for your family. 

Some of your calculated figures seem about right, but others look a bit high to me. At first, I thought your take-home salary calculation seemed too low, but after researching it a bit myself, I realise that it's probably about right when you consider the pension contributions - you could always consider trying to contribute less than £200 a month to start with if you're really struggling.

I'm not sure how likely it is that you will be able to put away £400 in savings each month - that's quite a lot to save - my parents can only save about that much per year on a combined income of about £44,000.

Also, the £400 per month on food seems high too - more like the cost of feeding a family of five. I'm not sure about costs of feeding a baby, but the national average that people live on food-wise is £15-£20 per week per adult - that's only £120-£160 per month to feed you and your husband, compared to £400 for the 3 of you. That's based on eating in rather than out - eating out is expensive here (about double what a dinner out costs in the US) and is something my family can only afford to do on birthdays and special occasions. Going with £20 per week per person, you could reduce your yearly costs by over £2,000.

To be honest, things like baby college funds are not that important in the UK because university education here costs a great deal less than in the US (at least looking at US out of state tuitions). Although the fees have risen recently to £3,000 per year, the government offers tuition loans as well as normal student loans so parents don't have to pay as much towards tuition if they can't afford it. Before the higher fees came in, my parents paid just £7,500 for 8 years of college (4 years for me and 4 years for my brother) - compared to a similar amount per year in the US.

A quick comparison: cost of 1 year of tuition at Harvard = cost of 5 years of tuiton at Oxford or Cambridge

Are my numbers way off compared to the real cost of living outside of London? I have heard that the north is less expensive, but is that just the cost of apartments or are utilities, groceries etc. also less expensive? His commute would only be 20 or 30 minutes from Reading and it would keep us from having to buy a car--if we lived up north would transportation be an issue?

Apart from London, the next 3 biggest urban areas in England are in the north - 2.2 million people in the West Midlands conurbation, 2.2 million in Greater Manchester and 1.5 million in West Yorkshire. In comparison, Reading only has a population of about 370,000 people. If you lived in or near these urban areas, you're likely to find good public transport which may even be cheaper than in the south.

I'm not sure how accurate I'm being here (still a student and scrounging off my parents at the moment), but I hope some of this helps .

Thanks this does help a lot! Yeah...I wasn't sure about some of my numbers on groceries and things and just did a direct dollars to pounds which probably wasn't very accurate. Too bad about the savings though---how do people afford to buy property without a proper deposit? I guess more people rent for longer periods over there?

Thanks again!

Basically, people who are not already on the property ladder can't afford to buy houses or flats. Over the last 10 years, UK house prices have risen so much that the chances of my generation and the kids of today being able to own a house in the future are becoming slimmer. Quite a few university graduates in the UK now move back home after their degree because they can't afford to live on their own.

In 1999, my parents bought our 5-bedroom house with an apartment above the garage for £135,000. Now, in 2007, it's worth over £250,000 and you can barely find a 2-bedroom apartment for that much. The average 3 or 4 bedroom house in my town now sells for more than £250,000 (that's half a million US$!) and one of the worries facing my parents is that their children will ever be home-owners and will be stuck renting for the majority of their lives.

My aunt in the US has been considering moving back to the UK. She currently owns a 5-bed, 4-bath large house with a swimming pool. If she sold it and moved to the UK, she would only be able to afford a small 3-bed house with one bathroom and a tiny garden - and she has a family of 5!

Even Madonna complained about the high cost of housing in this country and she can probably afford to buy as many houses as she wants here!

Buying a house is a whole other kettle of fish. The housing market in the UK is insane and TBH, you need to do your math on the Reading/Berkshire area house prices because you will need a very big mortgage there!

As for the grocery bill, that all depends. I personally don't think that's exceptionally high. To me, this is one of the great British conundrums. I know there are people on here who eat on what ksand24 quoted as the average. But my husband and I simply cannot do it. We spend on average, 80 pounds per week for food and other household items (cleaning products, litter for the cats, baby stuff, etc). Now we like our food, but we are hardly buying top of the line gourmet items or eating steak every night. And we don't impulse buy very much either (though we used to). We prefer to buy some things organic but we've realized that we simply can't shop that way right now. And our weekly bill is still about 80 quid.

There are some threads on here about food budgets that you can do a search for. I'm almost certain there's someone here who has a family of 5 she feeds on the same budget I do a family of 2-1/2!

http://talk.uk-yankee.com/index.php?topic=15848.0 (found it!)

Yeah, I do agree that not everyone can live on that average figure, but it can be done if money really is tight. When I was an undergrad, I used to spend more than that on food because I used to buy Boots meal deals and lots of snacks.

My parents have to be tight with money because we have so many little extra expenses (e.g. my brothers' gymnastics and badminton tournaments around the country). By only spending £80-£100 per week on food and by never getting take-out/going to restaurants, we can afford to pay for extra activities or go on holiday.

I'm someone who is (and always has been) careful with my money. In 5 years of being a student, I have never gone into an overdraft and when I was at sixth-form, I managed to live off £8 per week (most of my money went on driving lessons). I've always believed that you can find even cheaper ways of doing things than the quoted cost , whether it'sthe cost of flights to the US, or the amount we spend on household costs .

Yes, I should add that because we are on such a tight budget, we have times when we shop with a calculator and times when we don't have to worry quite so much. The calculator days, we HAVE to stay within a certain amount but on 'non worrying days', though we are still very careful, we'd spend about 80.

My hubby is a Ph.D. scientist originally from London, which means he makes decent living here (about $75/year) and I'm a writer and a graduate student (which basically makes nothing!) and we are expecting our first baby in July.

You sound very much like us, two years ago!  My husband is a Ph.D., worked for Johns Hopkins for peanuts ($31K!!) and I was enlisted in the Air Force.  We moved over when I was 5 months prego.  We were EXTREMELY scared, but knew it would be a better life for our child here than in Baltimore!

We had several factors going against us:
1. Academia doesn't pay!  Especially in Scotland... DH could make a whole LOT more in England, but his fam is up here.
2. My skills in the military didn't really apply to much here, so I'd be making seceterial wages and not really worth doing with childcare costs
3. Houses are soooo much more expensive here when you convert $ to £s

Still... we held our breath, took the plunge and really we're not want for much these days.

Yes, we'd have more "stuff" if we were in the states, but I'd probably be working instead of being a full time mommy.  My son is envolved in so much here, we've something on nearly every day and we really do feel at peace here!

I remember very clearly the stress of our first year here, but you just watch your pennies, eat out less, don't buy a big, expensive car and maybe a new dress only every once in a while.  In time, he'll get a raises and things won't be so tight.  You'll learn to adjust quickly.

Hope this helps!