Renting is a right bitch, mortgage for a 2.5 year old one bed flat in Morden is only £580 a month.
sell stuff you make?
My girlfriend is from Leeds and she has problems with a lot of her Leeds-based friends thinking we're loaded because we live in London. And they can probably guess what we pay in rent (er, it's more than 1,100!). To be honest last I looked you can't rent a 1-2 bed flat for less than 1000pcm unless you go to really horrible area!1100 a month on rent lolll
After my monthly expenses, not including rent, im left with under half of what your rent costs.
You are god.
WH to Sevenoaks? Bit of a change! What are your new travel costs going to be?I'm moving to Sevenoaks next month purely because the cost of renting leaves such a foul taste in my mouth. Moving in with a mate and will be paying a much more palatable £490 pcm.
2 hours from boro to London? It's a straight line to Kings Cross etc, takes 50 mins max. Where in London do you work?
Last time I checked a monthly ticket was around £250. Have you even looked into it?
Brighton is indeed around an hour away on the train (to Victoria/Blackfriars/London Bridge) but from having a few mates who live there I don't think it's all that much cheaper. I know there's lots of people who commute to Brighton but the prices are why it's sometimes known as London by the sea.
For the original post - I suppose my first thought would be that if this is a good job which offers good prospects then how long is it until you'll see the benefit of them? It tends to be a lot easier to put up with a less than ideal situation if you're aware that it's for a limited time and you can focus on when it will get better.
I think the costs are starting to get factored in to some of these commuter belt towns so a lot of places that are right next to a mainline station giving 45min or less to central London will be carrying a bit of a premium. Some people might prefer to be in London anyway i.e. a 1hr commute with London on the doorstep might be preferable to living in, I dunno, Basingstoke or something.
Another advantage of London is a good direct train service to most of the UK, a train of say 2h15 or less gets you to Manchester, Bristol, Exeter, Brighton, Norwich, Birmingham, Leeds, Liverpool (heck even Paris) etc etc. Depends how quick you can get to the NR station but in broad terms it puts you very 'central'.
I'd agree however that "London" is a very big scope and you'd need to choose carefully in terms of location dependent on were you want to get to ('getting across' London is something that not everyone factors in to their initial thoughts).
I also live in Eltham (have done since I was 10 - except for 6 years for Uni and just after) and it takes me 10 minutes to walk to the train station and then 20 minutes on the train to get to London Bridge (add another 5 for Charing Cross), so commuting from there is perfectly okay and as I work 10 mins from London Bridge my travel costs would be about £100 a month (I say would as I don't train it very often because I usually drive in).
I work as an electrical engineer in oil & gas in London.
The grad scheme pay rises will quickly get to a very nice figure, but the starting salary is definitely not 40k here! Where I currently am the opportunities to travel come after a few years. That should be good.
He was including the income tax allowance then rounding up.
The figure is £8105 + £34370 = £42475. If you put a pound over that in a tax calculator that breakdown will shows 40p in the upper rate.
Personally I don't think it's too much, when you're earning that much you should be comfortable, with an aging population and tones of government debt less tax isn't going to fix anything, even if no one likes it.