Lowri Griffiths attempts to navigate London’s housing, transport, and food costs on a median salary
By Lowri Griffiths
I should explain the parameters. A normal person, for the purposes of this experiment, earns the London median salary, which the Office for National Statistics most recently placed at Pound Sterling 39,700 gross, or approximately Pound Sterling 2,650 per month net after tax and National Insurance, which sounds like enough money until you begin allocating it to the costs that London requires you to have before you can do anything else.
Rent: I live in a two-bedroom flat in Finsbury Park with a flatmate, which costs Pound Sterling 1,050 per month each. This is, by the standards of what two-bedroom flats in Finsbury Park currently let for, considered reasonable. I know this because when I moved in my landlord told me it was reasonable, which I experienced as a threat rather than a reassurance. My monthly rent is 40 percent of my net income before I have bought a piece of food or attended a single social event, which are the two activities that make London worth living in.
The Transport Mathematics
An annual Travelcard Zone 1-2 costs Pound Sterling 1,896, or Pound Sterling 158 per month. This covers the tube and most bus journeys within the relevant zone. It does not cover the occasions when you need to go somewhere beyond Zone 2, which in London is every time anyone you know invites you to a birthday party in Walthamstow or a housewarming in Acton. These occasions are more frequent than the Zone 1-2 conceptual framework implies and more expensive than you remember each time they occur.
Adding transport to rent removes Pound Sterling 1,208 per month, leaving Pound Sterling 1,442 for everything else. Everything else includes: food, which I estimate at Pound Sterling 300 per month if I am cooking and significantly more if I am buying lunch near where I work; utilities and council tax, which together run to approximately Pound Sterling 180; a phone, which runs to Pound Sterling 45; and the approximately Pound Sterling 80 per month I spend on social events, which in London means two dinners out and one activity involving a ticket and a drink, which is, it turns out, the bare minimum expenditure required to maintain the relationships that make London worth living in.
What This Leaves
By my calculation: approximately Pound Sterling 637 per month, which sounds meaningful until I note that it represents my entire discretionary budget including savings, clothing, medical and dental costs, any cultural activity more expensive than a museum (which are free, and I have been to all of them more times than a person should need to), and the approximately Pound Sterling 150 per month that disappears through a combination of minor expenses I cannot account for individually but which aggregate reliably to exactly Pound Sterling 150 and which I have decided to attribute to London itself, as a kind of informal city tax.
The ONS earnings data confirms the salary figures. The Numbeo London cost of living data confirms most of the expense figures, though the Numbeo figures are averages and the reality has a higher variance than averages capture. Lowri Griffiths covers London life at prat.uk.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com
