Parents' £2,500 bill to get children to leave

A survey of parents whose children have grown up and left home found 85 per cent contributed financially to their children making a new start.

The £2,570 average bill includes £1,114 to equip their child with the items they need for university, £631 helping their child set up in their first rented flat or house and another £825 forked out when their child wants to buy their own home.

The survey from Nationwide Savings found that while nearly half of children had left the family home by the time they were 18, one in 12 stayed put in the parental nest past their 25th birthday.

As well as the initial set-up costs, many parents surveyed said they continue to give their adult children cash or buy them goods to help them out.

A quarter contribute once a month and one in five pay out twice a month or more.

On each occasion, the average amount gifted is £44, although one in five parents give £90 or more.

More than half of parents fund this spending from savings and a third cover the costs from their normal income.

But some parents put themselves into debt to help their children, with six per cent putting the cost on a credit card, five per cent dipping into an overdraft and three per cemnt using a personal loan.

Nationwide’s head of savings Tom Riley said: “The significant financial impact of having children is undisputed, but our research shows that parents go on financially supporting their children well into adulthood.”

For some of the 1,000 parents surveyed, their children leaving home also marked a fresh start for them.

More than a quarter (27%) said they had redecorated the house, while one in six moved house, one in 16 took up a new hobby - and a further four per cent got divorced.

Two-thirds of parents saw their household food bills reduce after their child left home, two in five saw savings on utility bills, a third saved on phone bills and a quarter spent less on petrol.

Asked how they felt when their child left home, a third were proud, one in 10 (10%) felt distraught and a further 13% reported feeling lonely.

One in 16 said they had felt relieved - and one in 50 said they were ecstatic.

Meanwhile, growth in households’ spending has slowed to the weakest rate seen since the end of 2013 as rising prices take a stronger grip on people’s finances, according to an index.

Spending increased by 0.9 per cent annually across the first quarter of 2017, marking the weakest quarterly performance since the last three months of 2013, Visa’s UK Consumer Spending Index found.

The annual growth in spending fell back to one per cent in March, from a 1.3 per cent annual increase in February.

Kevin Jenkins, UK and Ireland managing director at Visa, said: “Our data suggests that consumer spending is beginning to slow from the strong levels seen in late 2016, as rising prices increasingly squeeze household purchasing power.

“While overall spend continued to expand in March, the average growth rate for quarter one slowed down sharply to 0.9 per cent from 2.7 per cent in quarter four 2016.

“Quarter one was in fact the weakest quarter in terms of growth in the past three years.”