Kings Student Money Mentors

A Typical Week of Spending in London

London has to be one of the most vibrant, lively and exciting cities to live in as a student. But it’s also the most expensive city in the UK… so, just how expensive is it really? In this blog, I’m going to explore how expensive living in London is by taking you through a typical week of my spending as a first-year student living in halls at KCL. I’d like to preface that everyone’s individual spending will differ vastly depending on a number of factors and my own spending fluctuated greatly from week to week before I sorted out a budget for myself, but hopefully this will give you an idea of what costs to expect!

Accommodation: £169p/w

Utility bills: £0

By far, my greatest cost (and this will be the same for almost every student) was the rent for my student accommodation. I was actually very lucky to be paying an untypically low rent, compared to my fellow London peers, due to me being on the KAAS scheme (King’s Affordable Accommodation Scheme), which essentially offers accommodation at a reduced rate for students from lower income backgrounds, meeting certain eligibility criteria. This meant my weekly rent was reduced from £204 to £169, and this included all my utility bills. The weekly rent for King’s accommodation ranges from £160 to £335.

Grocery shop £25-30

One thing I started to do (and would recommend to other students) was to pick a specific day of the week for grocery shopping, and to create a shopping list before stepping out. This helped to prevent overspending as I was less tempted to pick up random things I wouldn’t need throughout the week or when shopping. I would usually visit Lidl with one of my flatmates on a Sunday and spend around £30 but would sometimes do a larger shop at Asda for £60+. This is because I love cooking and would sometimes need more niche ingredients from here. However, this would then last me longer than a week, aside from fresh goods. On the weeks where I’d just returned from visiting home, I would spend much less on grocery shopping as I’d bring home-cooked food with me. Therefore, I only spent around £20 on groceries on this week.

Transport: £7.90

My accommodation was just an 8-minute walk from Guy’s Campus, where all my teaching was based. On this particular week, I used the tube once (to get to Oxford Street) and the bus once (to get to Covent Garden).

Social: £15

It was my flatmate’s birthday on this week, so we ate out a place called Yori in Covent Garden. Later in the week, I also visited the Wallace Collections, aka the pink museum (for free) with a friend, and then walked to Oxford Street where we ate some chips. Excluding transport costs, this added up to £15.

Tea and coffee: £3

I’m not much of a tea or coffee drinker, but I did visit a café during the weekend to get some studying done outside of the library environment. I ordered a latte for £3.

Monthly subscriptions/bills: £4.50

Sim: £2.50 per week (Voxi)
Gym: £1 per week! (King’s’ Sport gyms had an offer where you could pay £40 for a membership for the whole academic year if you lived at GDSA or SSA)

Amazon prime: £1 per week (Student price)

Other: £8

At this point in the year, I started bringing food with me to the library, but on days I forgot to being some with me, I would buy a Tesco meal deal or falafel wrap (which happened once this week). Laundry at my accommodation cost me £3.50 weekly. I also bought the occasional thing from Sainsbury’s, which was directly opposite my accommodation.

Total excluding rent: £58.40

Total including rent: £227.40

Just a reminder that spending and costs will be different for everyone and will differ week to week. E.g., I would spend a lot more on groceries if I was trying new recipes on some weeks or spend a lot more on social activities – especially during the start of the year. I myself am still learning to manage my own money and budget, but hopefully, this has given you some insight into what to expect.

So, there you have it – a typical week of spending from the perspective of a student living in London!

Tasniya Aktar
King’s Student Money Mentor
Part of Money & Housing Advice

The King’s Student Money Mentors blog shares our students’ personal experiences and thoughts on money-related topics. Any reference, opinions or recommendations on a particular company/brand are only the views of the student(s) who wrote the blog post. King’s College London, the Money & Housing Advice service and the Money Mentor project do not share the views in the blogs nor endorse any of the companies mentioned. Readers should conduct their own research before using any companies mentioned in our blog posts.

Train and air travel: student tips and tricks

Hey! With the COVID rules loosening up, many of us are looking for a chance to travel somewhere and take a much-needed break, but money-wise, this can often be much easier said than done.

I’m going to share some tips and tricks to save some money when you travel by two popular modes of transportation for travelling students: trains and flights. By the end of this blog post, you’ll be able to say YES to the next holiday your optimistic friend puts in your group chat.

Train travel

Let’s start with trains. To be clear, I’ll be talking about overground trains – not the London Underground (the Tube). First off, consider getting a railcard. Railcards offer discounts on train travel within the UK. There’s the 16-25 railcard and the 26-30 railcard, and they both give you 1/3 off on the price of your train ticket.

A one-year travelcard will cost £30, but there are other ways to get the travelcard at a reduced price. I received a 16-25 railcard when I set up my student bank account with Santander – this is a fantastic option because you can get a four-year travelcard entirely free!

Be flexible with your timings! One of the best tips I can give you is to go for off-peak times – most train operators will have both ‘off-peak’ and ‘super-off-peak’ times, and these can be real money-savers. Journeys outside of rush-hour times are cheaper, and keep in mind, most weekends and bank holidays are also classed as ‘off-peak’ travel. So, choose one of these times if you can!

Something we students are particularly good at is finding discounts on apps, and there are tons of good ones available. The one I’ve used the most is Trainline, which offers regular information about the cheapest available trains, and sends you notifications about journeys with reduced prices. Another benefit of Trainline is that it lets you book up to 180 days in advance, which is longer than any other ticket seller I’ve encountered so far.

Find where trains are cheap. Eastern and central Europe has some fantastic locations that can be accessed easily with trains and may be relatively inexpensive compared to western Europe. Some great places to go to via train, where travel is inexpensive, are Poland, Hungary and Romania.

When we think of train travel as students, interrailing is one of the first things we might think of, and it’s a great way to get around Europe. Technically, interrailing is travelling around Europe using the ‘Interrail Pass’ (or the Eurail Pass for non-European citizens) and can offer you a way to see up to 33 European countries at low prices, with the ability to change the dates of your travel quickly. If you’re under 28, you’re eligible for the even more discounted ‘Youth Fares’. Interrailing is cheap, quick, a classic student activity, and one I’d really recommend.

Shop around! This is classic Money Mentor suggestion that you’ll see on any of our blogs, and it applies to travel too! I know it can be stressful booking travel tickets, and demoralising when you’re repeatedly bombarded with extortionate prices. But don’t be tempted to always book with the most well-known train companies! An example of shopping around is when I found Lumo through social media – a new train operator that’s currently offering a cheap new route from London to Edinburgh.

Air travel

Air travel is a faster way of getting around but can often be even more expensive than trains. Despite that, there are still a bunch of things you can do to reduce your air fare and allow yourself to whizz off to wherever you want to go.

As I mentioned for train travel, there are some great apps that you can use for cheaper flights. One great one that I’ve used is ‘Skyscanner’. From what I’ve seen, it offers cheaper flights than any other app and shows you flights for entire countries rather than just specific airports. It also has a feature called ‘Mashups’ where you can mix and match different flights from different airlines, which can often work out cheaper. Apart from Skyscanner, there are many other apps/sites that you can research, like ‘Kayak’, and ‘Expedia’.

Again, shop around! Comparison sites like Momondo can be very helpful in your toolkit for hunting for the best air travel bargain. I’ve also known people to use apps like Hopper, which can tell you whether prices are likely to rise/fall for your destination over time, or websites like lastminute.com, which give you last-minute deals, and these can both be useful if your timescale for booking is more limited.

Stay incognito. This sounds like a strange one, but I can tell you from experience that if you remain as anonymous as possible when searching for flights, you’re more likely to find cheap ones. This is because airlines can use your data and quickly raise their prices when they know that you’re looking at certain flights and the demand for those flights is rising. To avoid this, delete your search cookies and use an incognito browser when searching. Looking as a guest on websites that offer flights instead of making an account can also help.

Consider booking flights and accommodation together! Not only has this helped me find great package deals, but it also saves the headache of trying to find somewhere to stay separately from your flight booking. These sorts of package deals usually include food/drinks and can be offered at affordable prices by holiday companies. According to Save the Student, with these, you can even sometimes get the whole holiday for cheaper than the cost of a single flight!

I hope this brief trip (pun intended) into the world of travel savings has helped you and made your next journey a little bit easier. Bon Voyage!

Shivam Chotai
King’s Student Money Mentor
Part of Money & Housing Advice

Money and travel: how to save money on travel as a student, one possible solution

Me: Hi, my name is Yahye.

Group: Hello Yahye.

Me: and I am a TFL addict.

I feel like this is the internal dialogue that I have with myself whenever I look at my banking app at the end of every day. Having tried every remedy thus far for trying to reduce my weekly travel costs, I have ended up back to square one every day. However, I knew in the back of my mind there was one thing that I had never bothered to do and that was… wait for it… riding a bike. I was totally dreading trying this idea out with all the different worst-case scenarios running through my head and the biggest excuse being money. Being a student, money is probably our most deficient resource between food, travel, daily essentials, and rainy-day savings. The paycheck from my part time job at the end of the week just seems to run dry. Therefore, it was time to get out the big guns… Excel.

So, I opened a new book and started running through my bank statements trying to figure out how much money per month I spend on TFL: it’s around £100 give or take. Then I looked up how much a second-hand bike would cost – found one for around £180 on Facebook marketplace. Nice, so finances are financing, and technically, I would be able to buy one second hand. This left one problem in my sweaty rush hour hands – how safe was a second-hand bike really?

Those who know me would tell you, the great outdoors isn’t great for me. Plus, being someone who has not ridden a bike in over 10 years, I did not think it would fare well. After speaking to a friend who was going through the same thing, I decided on getting a new bike so that I could have a guarantee on its safety. My next step was just practicing, trying to learn road safety, and making cycling with my new bike as easy as possible to make sure I don’t get myself killed. I found a Google Maps-type app that suggests bike safe paths across London to help further increase my safety – the app is called cycle.travel. Also, I quickly learnt that I got sweaty quickly, and so I decided it would be appropriate to keep a second shirt and a deodorant on hand for the days I was traveling to work or University. This was just one difficulty that I faced when trying out this new lifestyle choice, which aimed to replace my regular commutes on TfL with cycling. But of course, there are other difficulties that you could face depending on the weather, what time of day it is, and where you live.

To conclude, as much as ‘get a bike’ is the common advice you would hear, I can see very clearly why it would not be for everyone – especially if you live in areas with unsafe roads, no bike lanes or have a long commute. It may also not be a safe option for some, as you must take into consideration all kinds of different scenarios that may prevent you from riding a bike to university on certain days. Hence, although riding a bike could be a great alternative to TFL, people should carefully consider the pros and cons of cycling before making any investments into a bike.

Yahye Mohamud
King’s Student Money Mentor
Part of Money & Housing Advice