Post
by dhilipki » Fri Dec 31, 2004 11:23 am
Taikoo,
Housing depends upon which part of London you live. But generally for a two bedroom flat, expect to spend anywhere between £700-800 PCM (per calendar month). Add another £90-110 PCM for council tax again depending on the area you choose to live.
Provisions are really broad and it really depends upon you. I'm an single Indian and I spent about £250 PCM on food alone, not including my wine/beer spend. Add that & some weekly getaway expenses, my monthly food expenses came to around £500 on an average easily. Keep in mind though that I mostly used to buy ready-to-eat meals and burgers. And I dont have kids yet:) So my guess is that your monthly provisions should run upto £600 PCM easy, provided you cook 90% at home, and not including alcohol et al. But then, I'm a single guy and you'd be well advised to take heed the words of those married guys out there.
For transport, if you're in London, you'll use the tube and bus. You can get monthly, quarterly or annual passes which you can use through out the year. Or if you prefer, you can buy tickets everyday and loose a lot of money!! In London, you travel in zones, i.e., if you have to go from Waterloo station to Canary Wharf, you will be travelling from zone 1 to zone 5 and you will need to buy your tickets accordingly. Passes and tickets are issued based on these zones. There are six zones altogether. The more zones you have to travel, the more you pay for your pass. I used to buy monthly season pass for travel between zone 1 to zone 5 and it used to cost me about £135 per month (about a year back). If you are travelling between only two or three zones expect that to go down a lot. Like in India, monthly passes are for unlimited travel and you can use them to travel using any public transport, i.e., tube & bus. But then, your kids will want to goto the IMAX & Thames once a while!
Expect to spend around £20-30 per month separately on gas, electricity & water on an average. Don't remember how much I used to pay for these three put together. Landlines are generally provided by British Telecom and I used to spend around £20 on calls every month. For calls to India, I generally bought cards which gave access to toll free numbers. Calling toll free numbers from the BT phone is free anytime. You have various choices while choosing your landline, so the cost will depend on what you choose. For mobile, I had a prepaid connection and I guess I spent £45 to get the connection activated. From then on, I topped up around £15 once in two months, but then, I was a prudent (or rather stingy) mobile user and didn't use fancy stuff like GPRS & MMS. Good thing is, incoming calls are free even for prepaid users.
Dial-up Internet costs around £15 per month. I used AOL and there are no line charges (toll free numbers again) and you can stay online as long as you want. All you need is a good dial-up modem and then you are on. Connection speeds are acceptable and good. Its been a year since I came back to India and now I guess, for £20 you get broadband Internet from the likes of Tiscali & even BT. Don't know the initial cost of connection though.
Cable TV is also your choice. You can use NTL, which is a real land based cable connection, or Sky, which is DTH satellite connection. If you don't want cable at all, you will still be able to get five free channels, mostly BBC broadcasts. Sky connections cost anywhere between £40-80 to activate and a minimum of £14 per month. Depending on the channels you activate, this will go up. Sky provides somewhere around 15 channels for the minimum subscription, including the five free to air channels. Oh, and the clincher!! You have to pay the government a "TV license fee" of £116 every year per colour television that you own!!! Don't think you can get away without paying this fee since the TV license team has fairly sophisticated equipment to detect your television without even getting into your home and send you a warning notice. They have mobile teams constantly roaming around with their high-tech vans to find out if any one owns a television and haven't paid up the license fee!! Its an irony, because if you buy a 21" TV, the TV itself would cost only around £100 and you pay more money than the cost of your TV to the government to own it!!
Public schools are free but I don't quite know whether they are free for temporary residents like work permit holders and even for HSMP people. From what I know, private schools are expensive even by British standards.
I guess you can pull the numbers from this verbose text and do the math. For a family of four like yours, the average cost of living will be around £1600-1750 per month, but then, just make sure I got the numbers right for the provisions part. Hope this helps.
