Leaving Home Can Be An Expensive Business

Leaving home

If you want to sample independent living in Essex, Suffolk or Kent, or anywhere else there are a few things you need to make sure you know before you embark on this course of action.

Can you afford it? Are you ready for it? Are you responsible enough? If you want to be living independently in Essex that means paying your own bills, feeding yourself, cooking and cleaning for yourself and budgeting.

If you decided that staying at home with mum and dad for a bit longer would be a better idea, you are in good company.

The Office for National Statistics says that many young adults in their mid 20s and early 30s, especially men, are increasingly postponing their transition to adulthood. According to them, 25 per cent of young men aged between 25 and 29 are living with their parents. This is almost double the proportion of women of the same age range (just 13 per cent).

One in three "adult-kids" say they are staying at home because they cannot afford to get onto the property ladder or rent.

If you do decide to live away from home you need to make sure you do the maths properly. Check out what kind of area you'd like to live in first. A quick inspection of the property pages of your local newspaper will tell you how much a one-bedroom flat, for instance will set you back.

Then you need to look into what the council tax is per month for the type of property that you are interested in. A look at the local council's website will tell you this. Then speak to someone you know who is already living on their own in the kind of property you'd like to rent and ask them how much they pay for heating and lighting.

Energy bills are going up and up and there is no sign of them diminishing so this could be a real issue for you. Then have a chat with the person in your house who pays the food bills and ask them to estimate how much you'll need to spend per week on your groceries.

There will also be set up costs involved in acquiring your own rented pad. You'll need furniture, cleaning products, curtains, lamps, towels etc. Still interested in living independently in Essex? If you are after seeing the list of expenses then you must be committed. Well done, because that is what it is going to take.

The next step in those set up costs is to find your first month's rent, plus a month and a half's rent to put down as a deposit. This could easily set you back almost £1,000, for the smallest of rents, depending on where you want to live if you are outside city areas.

Once you are in the property, if you can only afford to stay in and watch telly, then you'll need a TV licence, which at the moment is £145 per year.

If all these costs seem rather daunting to you, then don't despair, most of them can be divided up and paid for on a monthly basis. All you need to do is make sure that your income is enough to cover the costs and leave you with enough money at the end of the month to live.