When I first moved in May 2022, my rent was £995. In May 2023, it went up to £1024.85.
In the early Spring of 2024, my London landlord notified our whole building that the rent would be taking a jump at our next renewal in May to £1125 for a one bedroom apartment in Woolwich/Plumstead in a converted, private house that was absolutely always freezing and had an electric meter that regularly malfunctioned and just ate the money I put on it sometimes.
At the time, I was also considering moving in with my boyfriend, which, while it would have been a massive rent drop, would have meant living in a really tiny space together, which I just really didn't want to do. I also wanted to live somewhere that friends and family from the States could visit. This was already complicated enough cramming them in my little apartment with just me. I knew it wouldn't really work if we were living together.
So after some discussion, we agreed to find a two-bedroom apartment, but I quickly learned that we are at different financial spots in our lives, and since our maximum rent we could afford together was around £1800 a month, a two-bedroom apartment in London was not happening.
I also cannot fully make you understand how impossible it was to warm this apartment and how cold it was every winter, despite monthly gas bills of £150+ on my own.
So I did a little scouting and found a little town at the end of the commuter line into London, with several good connections (three large train companies go through here into London, so if there are issues with one, the others are usually running).
And then I looked up places we could rent out here and could not stop laughing hysterically. There is so much space in the suburbs. We love it here. I don't think we could ever go back to London now.
But I still had a full year of school left, which included teaching three courses as a Teaching Assistant, monthly supervisor meetings, and the occasional PhD meetup or event. And my partner's family lives in London, so sometimes we go back to see them. It did leave me wondering if moving was the best choice.
I ran a bunch of numbers and I still felt like it would probably be cheaper to live out in Peterborough – especially since we split the rent and utilities. And despite the increasingly ridiculous cost of train travel in the UK.
Today we crunch a year of numbers for a moment of truth.
For simplicity, I'm going to turn that £1125 into $1500 monthly rent.
I also did an average of my monthly utilities from July 2023-June 2024 and my average transit cost (which was TfL, trains and the occasional Uber).
The utilities averaged $172/month and transit was $138/month. Taking our monthly totally to just exist in London to $1810. Or $21,720 annually.
Did a year in Peterborough beat that?
Well my rent from August 2024-July 2025 was £625 and in July 2025 it went up to £650. We rent a three bedroom, three bathroom terrace house (like an American townhouse), with a garden in back. It was actually larger than we thought we needed but I am completely spoiled with my own office and my partner uses the guest bedroom as his office most of the time too.
So for this math, I will use $835 as my monthly rent conversion. I would say the exchange rate has definitely gone up between US dollars and pounds over the last year, but as I checked the August 2024 accountability report, the £625 there was $820. So lets do the math for all 12 months as $835, which will cover the little increase into this August when our rent went up for the next year.
I also have to pay a council tax of $78/month, which I was exempt from in London because my household was all students. We only get a 25% discount now from council tax, so we split it.
Now, I definitely was a little sloppy in my budget tracking each month, because I started out by lumping busses, TfL, trains and Ubers into a category called “travel” but I do have a grand total of extra spending: $4430 in travel
- Total Rent: $10,020
- Total Council Tax: $936
- Utilities: $2130
- Travel Spending: $4430
$1458/month or $17,506 annually
Just over $4,000 of savings.
My utilities average went up $6, though not surprising going from a little flat to a full townhouse. And council tax was kind of a nasty surprise, though I do benefit from things like trash pickup, etc. It just makes no sense to me if when I lived alone, it was free, but when I live with a non-student, it's now only 25% off. It's mathematically illogical.
I will say that initial estimates of the train being £25, based on a very little research and not understanding peak versus non-peak versus…. Dude, I don't even know. Train pricing is so confusing here… was totally wrong really.
I would say it's a rare day when a round trip ticket to London costs me less than £30. It's not unusual for it to cost that one way. That's with a student railcard. On the slow train (an hour twenty from Peterborough into St. Pancras). And to get the best deals, I usually have to book the full ticket – there and back – in advance, which isn't always possible. Sometimes I'm not totally sure what time I'm heading back to Peterborough. There was a show I volunteered with several nights after teaching and I usually wouldn't head home till nearly midnight (on the plus side, the very late trains are often cheaper, even as last minute purchases).
Additionally, my partner's mom got sick, so we were in London every weekend from Friday night till Sunday afternoon from January through April. Our ticket time for Friday was always reliably peak, right after he got off work. Once in a while I would go in early and study at the British Library just travel off-peak. And we could never buy in advance for Sunday because we never knew when we were coming home.
I had estimated £100 a month for train tickets but most months it was pretty much double that.
I also forgot to factor in the cost of getting to school once I was in London, which was like an extra £10 in tube fare. Then there was the fact that London is dark, rainy and cold for 80% of the year and it turns out if I have to be at the train station by 7 AM, I am absolutely taking an Uber in that weather. Which is usually another £7 each way. When the weather is nicer I do walk or ride my bike, but also, if I'm getting home at 1 or 1:30 AM after working at or seeing a show, it doesn't really feel safe.
So that extra £24 is an extra $30-$32.50 per trip.
I also think I just kind of forgot how expensive and difficult it is now to get to the airport. While I didn't include this in our spending, because it's largely optional, we do usually wind up booking a night at the hotel next to the airport when we fly somewhere now, because the trains are questionably reliable and if we have an early flight, it's impossible to get to the airport with public transport.
I will say one thing I miss from London was being 20 minutes away from London City Airport for little jaunts over to continental Europe. That is, by far, the best airport in London.
But overall, I think we made the right choice. My school sent me a letter saying they were concerned about how far away I was living six months after moving here, but it turns out they can't actually tell you where to live in the UK and after pointing out I had missed nothing since moving here and was saving money, they left me alone.
We'll see how I feel about this move come spring 2026, when I'm looking for a job, but at the moment, this place feels like the most “home”-y space I've lived in since I left home for college at 18 and it works well for us. I'm hopeful I will manage to drag the partner back to the States in a few years, but until then I expect Peterborough to be home.
