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Message: <blockquote data-quote="average_jo123" data-source="post: 212766" data-attributes="member: 15838"><h3>Part-time work alongside full-time SQE prep</h3>I have gotten questions about this in my inbox so thought I should just share my thoughts and my experience on this in this thread. One question that a lot of people tend to be quite anxious about is whether they should work part-time whilst studying the SQE full-time. Some may also wonder whether it is possible to work full-time and do SQE prep part-time.I should caveat that whatever it is I say here, I say it from a very privileged position of being sponsored to do SQE prep full-time by a firm, and so cannot shed light on what it would be like to do SQE prep full-time whilst working part-time or the other way round i.e. working full-time whilst doing SQE prep part-time. I am sure there are plenty of people out there who do have experience with either working full-time/SQE prep part-time or SQE prep full-time/working part-time (at least I see quite a few on Reddit, but you might find a few in this forum too) and passed with flying colours, so might be worth reaching out to them to see how they approached it.I remember speaking to a friend at the start of the year about this and she told me she was very tempted to work part-time as she was worried that her maintenance grant was not going to be enough. I felt the same but I decided to wait it out and see if I would be able to manage the course before throwing myself into part-time work. A few weeks of waiting turned into a few months and now I've finished SQE2 and I still have not gotten a part-time job. I felt SQE1 prep especially was so intense I barely had enough time to rest and to do other things I deemed important e.g. spending time with family, going to church etc.If you are also sponsored and you want an idea of how far your maintenance grant will go, I'm just going to talk about mine here with full transparency so you get a rough idea and you can then decide whether money will be an issue to you. Sorry if anything I say below sounds a bit stupid to you (especially if you've lived in London for a few years / your whole life — but I had never lived in London before and don't have family who have so I would have appreciated someone telling me this!) My maintenance grant was £20,000 for the whole 12 months, averaging about £1,600 a month. If you are renting in London, your rent will definitely be your biggest money drainer. Depending on how much you pay for rent, that will have a huge impact on how much you will have leftover to spend on other things. My rent in Zone 2 was approx £960/month (bills included). Some of my other classmates lived also in Zone 2/3 in various flat shares and studios for anywhere between £850 to £1,200 - so it is a bit of a game of luck how much you end up paying for rent. It also hugely depends on what your priorities are (i.e. what do you value more — space, distance from central London or cheaper rent) and whether you already have someone else in mind that you are flat-hunting with. I had no friends moving to London with me so had to settle with any empty room I could find and live with strangers, but you might have a much more enjoyable time moving in with someone you already know and making the space your own. Some people I know also chose to live at home — if the commute is doable and you don't mind staying at home for an extra year, this can save you a lot of money.When deciding where to rent in London, you should bear in mind as well how long you intend to stay there for and how often do you actually need to commute into the city. It might also be worth checking in advance with the university how many contact hours you have in a week and how many days you actually need to be in. For me at ULaw, we only had to be in three days a week. If I had known this and known that I will only be staying here for SQE prep and move when I actually start my TC, I probably would have moved somewhere further out to get cheaper rent for my SQE year. If I knew I would only be commuting in three days a week instead of five, I wouldn't mind a longer commute at all. Once you've worked out the commute time you're happy with, you should also factor in train fares as well (including what it would cost to travel peak/off-peak times) to work out if it's worth the savings in rent in moving further out after you take into account train fares you would be paying with moving further out.Once you've sorted rent that you're comfortable with, all that's left is budgeting accordingly for all your other expenses. I spend £60 to £80 on TfL alone — this is train fare for going to uni and also going out and about on weekends. A lot of people can't tell you off the top of their heads how much they spend on TfL in any given month, usually because they just touch in and out on contactless card and TfL charges them ad-hoc at the end of everyday and you just don't really keep track. So I personally like to keep it all on my Oyster so I am reminded of the pain I feel every time I top up £50 on my card. Transport is just one of those expenses that you can't avoid, so you shouldn't get too hung up on this, but it is good to have some level of awareness of how much you need to budget out for unavoidable expenses like these. I am also abnormally tight about not travelling on TfL trains during peak hours LOL - it's either I will wait it out in the uni library till it's off-peak or I will just get the longer bus journey home and do my SQE1 flashcards on the bus. I remember chatting to my classmates about this and some of them said they just study in bed till 09:30 and only get on the tube after 09:30 just to avoid peak tube fares. Doing this is not going to magically save you £500 a month, but it does help you save like £1.50 maybe £2 here and there, and when you're not on a lot of money in London you just take these small wins whenever you can lol.Being on £1,600 in London with 60 - 70% spent on rent and transport alone just means you need to budget the rest carefully. I knew I wouldn't have the liberty of miscellaneous subscriptions like Netflix, Disney+, expensive gym memberships, fitness classes etc. Or other wants like eating out, alcohol or shopping. Also just build up simple habits like avoiding peak tube if possible, packing your own lunch etc. You can probably save a lot more in a lot less time by simply not buying a new £150 jacket but these other little habits do add up too in the long run e.g. actively stopping yourself from buying lunch for £8 in central London or even £3.60 Tesco meal deals / £4 coffees — I consider these 'little luxuries' lol and I allow myself to get them only if absolutely necessary. But sometimes stuff just comes up (e.g. you need to get a new duvet, you need to get more prescription meds, go to the dentist, buy birthday / graduation / christmas presents) and means you spend more than usual. In a good month I would have £200 leftover, in a bad month I would have £0 leftover and in a very bad month I might blow my budget completely but I just make sure that I have enough leftover from other months to cover myself for the bad months.From my personal experience at least, I felt that I had signed myself up to a reasonable amount in rent such that when budgeted alongside all my other expenses, the grant that I had was just enough and I didn't feel a pressing need to work part-time just to get by. Overall I still had enough to eat out occasionally and buy some of my wants as well. I didn't have help from my parents and I didn't dip into any of my savings. However, this is only because I have absolutely no other financial commitments — you might be in a completely different situation if you have existing debt you need to pay off, you have caring responsibilities which involve you providing money for family, you need to save up a certain amount of money in the short-term for whatever reason etc. So if you are like me and you do not desperately need the extra cash, then consider carefully whether it is worth putting yourself through extra pressure for the extra cash (the last thing you want is to have a few extra thousand £s but leave insufficient time for you to prep properly and result in failing your exams). In cases other than mine, you might find that the grant isn't enough to see you through and you might need to work part-time to help you pull through. If you do decide that you want to get a part-time job whilst on a full-time prep course, the main factor you should consider is flexibility — will your employer be flexible about you taking time off to study? You might need extra flexibility especially in the final run up to your exams and if your employer does not understand how difficult these exams are and why you need that extra time off, it will be very difficult. If you are already working full-time and doing SQE prep part-time, do you have enough leave in case you need to take a block of time off to cram right before your exam and would the nature of your job allow you to do that?There is no definitive yes or no to the question of whether you should work part-time whilst studying for the SQE full-time. The answer for me personally was no, because I personally don't think I could handle the physical and mental load and also mainly because I didn't have any other financial commitments. No doubt you can find success stories of people managing this, but note this can also vary hugely with the type of part-time job you actually have; if you have a remote desk job with a kind and understanding boss, you'll definitely be able to manage it much better than if you were forced to work irregular shifts at a warehouse even in the last few weeks leading up to your exam. So the answer to this question will depend on your personal circumstances and the type of part-time job you are contemplating — main thing I will stress is just making sure that you have enough flexibility around the job so that your revision is not too heavily impacted by it.</blockquote>

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