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Most families we sit down with are running several plans at once: a mortgage with years left on it, a child who will need a deposit long after they stop needing a nursery place, an income everything else quietly depends on, and a parent up the road whose situation could change on any given Tuesday. Financial planning for families is the work of holding all of that in one view, and of knowing what each part costs the others. At H&D Financial Planning we start there. A decision about school fees is also one about the mortgage, and a decision about either is one about when you get to stop working. None of them is wrong on its own; they only make sense together.
“We’re doing all right, but everything is competing.” That is close to how most people describe the position, and it is precise. Some of what a household owes is fixed: the mortgage payment, the term dates, the standing orders that leave on the first of the month. Some of it is movable, and the movable part is where planning happens, because competing claims on the same money can still be re-ordered there — whether the extension waits, when you top up a pension that has been quietly under-funded since the second child arrived.
Costs that arrive on fixed dates.
The largest commitment, and the longest.
What the household would need, and for how long.
Help that arrives with no date on it.
Two things settle most of it. First, order: money that pays school fees in 2026 is not there for a deposit in 2031. An order that is planned for and written down can be looked at together, tested as time passes and circumstances change, and revised accordingly. The same order carried in one person’s memory cannot be checked, shared or planned against.
Second, a rainy day fund. It is the least interesting part of a plan and the one that keeps the order intact: without one, a broken boiler or a redundancy turns a plan into forced choices. Financial resilience is a plan that has already allowed for those events, so when one happens the money comes from somewhere chosen in advance.
Seeing all of it side by side is what a cashflow model does. Our page on cashflow modelling sets out how one is built, and what it will and will not tell you.
Numbers help here, because the children’s years are the part of a family plan most often carried as a worry instead of an amount. Child Poverty Action Group research put the cost of raising a child to eighteen at £250,000 for a couple and £290,000 for a lone parent in 2025. Where fees are in the picture, SchoolScout’s survey of UK private school costs puts private school fees at about £7,471 a term at a day school and £17,976 at a boarding school, both including VAT.
Child Poverty Action Group, 2025.
Child Poverty Action Group, 2025.
SchoolScout survey, including VAT.
SchoolScout survey, including VAT.
Treat those as a floor and not a forecast. If that looks far too low to you, we are not going to argue: it can be a great deal more. What raising a child costs in Kent is not what it costs in London, and neither figure is what it costs in your household. It depends on the circumstances of the family doing it, and on what they decide they can afford.
If you would rather have your own number than an average, the government publishes a worksheet for working out the cost of raising your children that you can read online or download and work through item by item, for the years ahead.
A new arrival brings an administrative list before a financial one. Registering the birth comes first, then the Child Benefit claim, worth making even where a higher earner hands some of it back through the tax system. Child Benefit rates for the 2026/27 tax year, published by GOV.UK, are £27.05 a week for an eldest or only child and £17.90 a week for each additional child. After that, what an employer pays during leave matters, and so does whether cover bought for two adults still fits a household of three.
Later the shape changes and the arithmetic does not. University brings three years of partial support while the mortgage is still running, and a deposit for a first home is the largest single transfer most parents make, landing in the years earmarked for their own retirement saving. Savings for children started early do most of that work; Junior ISAs are one route, and GOV.UK puts the annual savings limit at £9,000 for the 2026/27 tax year. Our page on tax-efficient savings, including Junior ISAs covers how they work.
Passing money on is the same question seen from the far end. On GOV.UK’s inheritance tax rules for 2026/27, up to £3,000 a year can be given away outside the estate, and larger gifts fall outside it once seven years have passed. Both change, and how they apply depends on the estate, which is why the detail sits with our inheritance tax and estate planning advice. The live question here is an ordering one: how much can reasonably move to children while you still need the money yourselves.
You can only spend the same money once, and the house is usually where most of it has gone. A mortgage is the largest commitment most families take on and the longest, which makes it the fixed point everything else works around, and the reason mortgage protection exists at all. In Kent it is often bigger than the investable wealth beside it: households in the £150,000 to £599,000 band frequently hold £500,000 to £1m or more in property equity on top.
The rest gets left out of family planning conversations, usually because it feels like the frivolous end. Moving costs money and displaces something else. Home improvement costs arrive in the same years as school fees. Saving for a holiday. A career break or sabbatical, where the sabbatical planning starts a year before the break does. A big planned purchase you have wanted for a decade. Each is funded from the same balance sheet, and each has a legitimate call on it.
Where savings or investments are drawn on to fund one of those goals, timing is the whole question, and one we advise on and keep under review with you: what is sold, in what order, in which tax year. A plan with no room for the things you actually want is a plan people stop following.
If one income stopped tomorrow, the question is less whether a household would cope than what would have to change, and how fast.
The mortgage is first: a household with one income gone still owes the same amount on the same day, and mortgage protection is the cover built for that. Second is income if you could not work, which is what income protection is for. Third is reviewing cover when a child arrives, because cover bought for two adults stops matching the household it was bought for, and life cover and family income benefit both do work there. Fourth is what happens to the plan itself, where critical illness cover enters the conversation. These are insurance policies, not investments, and what any of them covers depends on the terms and exclusions of the policy you hold.
Which cover does which job, and how much of it a one income household needs, is set out on our protection planning page. For protection policies we may receive commission from the insurer; we always tell you what we are paid before you commit.
As a mortgage is secured against your home, it could be repossessed if you do not keep up the mortgage repayments.
Your parents are the one call on a family balance sheet that nobody budgets for, because it arrives with no date on it. Sometimes it is a conversation about a stairlift and a downstairs bathroom. Sometimes it is a phone call from a hospital. It might also be nothing for another fifteen years, and then a great deal at once.
Supporting parents and children at the same time is one of the hardest squeezes in a family plan. Families caring for elderly parents while children are still at home carry the two heaviest costs in the same years, often on a reduced income if one parent has stepped back to do the caring, with care costs with no date on them behind all of it. The consequences are ordinary and expensive: fewer working hours, adaptations to somebody else’s house, and sometimes life cover for parents looked at for the first time in decades.
How care is paid for has rules of its own, not rules to pick up in a hurry from a page about something else. Our later life and care fee planning covers them. The part that belongs in a family plan is earlier and simpler: if this happened within three years, what would give way?
We are an independent firm of financial advisers, and an advice business serving families since 1987. Based in Maidstone, Kent, we provide services throughout Kent, London and the South East. Financial planning for couples and for single-parent households runs on the same arithmetic; only the room to manoeuvre differs. Most families arrive with the pieces in place and no single view of how they interact, so the work is about sequence, and about writing down what happens when an assumption changes.
A first meeting is a conversation about what you are trying to do and by when. Nothing is recommended in it. Our financial planning service sets out how the wider service fits together, and where retirement is the least resolved part, our retirement and pensions advice goes further. Our companion page for pre-retirees and retirees is written for readers closer to that stage.
Usually the one with the most flexible date. School terms and mortgage payments arrive whether or not the year has gone to plan, so the movable costs are where the room to adjust is. Writing the order down before it is tested turns that into a choice.
Put the dates on a single timeline and look at what else falls in those years. GOV.UK's worksheet for working out the cost of raising your children lists the items to expect at each age; add the ones particular to your household and you have a year-by-year figure instead of an average. Work it through yourself, or with a financial planner. It will not be exact and it does not need to be.
What is easy to miss is how late some of the costs run. If you expect to help with the costs of becoming an adult — tuition, rent in another city once they leave home, a deposit on a first home — those land just as your own retirement stops being an idea and becomes a date. That is where the big additional costs hide, and they are the ones worth planning well ahead.
Enough to keep the plan running for as long as it would take to rebuild the income. That depends on the mortgage, the ages of any children and what an employer would pay.
Working it out properly is worth the effort, because the exercise separates what a household must cover from what it would like to keep. Add up the children's costs, the mortgage, the groceries, the car and the standing orders, and you have the must-have figure: what the household would actually need through a redundancy or a long illness. Set what an employer would pay and what is already in savings against that, and the gap is what protection is there to fill.
By testing it against the years either side, not the year in front of you. A career break is affordable or not depending on what it displaces, and the answer often comes down to whether it lands before or after a fee year.
It should change what you have thought about, not necessarily what you are doing. Knowing which part of the plan would flex, and roughly how much room there is, is most of the value. Nothing needs deciding to a deadline.
Near the front, usually before any extra long-term saving. A rainy day fund is money kept in cash for the things that arrive without warning: a car, a roof, a few months between jobs. Its job is to stop everything else being interrupted when one of them happens, and building one is often the cheapest improvement available to a household that is otherwise doing everything right.
A pension is a long-term investment. The fund value may fluctuate and can go down. Your eventual income may depend on the size of the fund at retirement, future interest rates and tax legislation.
The value of your investments and income from them may go down. You may not get back the original amount invested.
This page is general financial education and does not constitute personalised financial advice. Your circumstances, goals, and tax position will affect the right decision for you. If you’d like to discuss your situation with one of our advisers, please get in touch.
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