Parents expect high creche fees and college costs but many are blindsided by the financial drain in between: the teenage years. From soaring food bills, clothing, sports and school expenses, and the “just €20” requests that never stop, raising teens can be one of the most overlooked demands on household finances. So how are parents coping, and what are their tips?The teenage years bring the kind of continuous, ad hoc spending that can torpedo family finances. “When we had two in creche, it was €1,700 a month ... Now you are spending a similar amount of money; it just doesn’t all come out of your bank account in one go,” says Tina* from Wicklow, who has a daughter (13), and two sons, 16 and 19. Outgoings for school, sport and their social lives are non-stop, hard to budget for and even harder to track.Ann Marie Gaynor has two teens, a son (18) and a daughter (14), as well as a younger and an older child. “The big thing with the teenager years, I’ve found, is the costs are completely unpredictable,” says Gaynor. “All the little things that just keep coming.”Small children don’t notice when you cut corners. But saying “No” hits different with teens, says Gaynor. “Teenagers like to belong ... a lot of the spending I find in the teenage years is around a sense of belonging. They want to go to the disco; they want to get food with their friends after school,” she says. So, a strict “need” for something isn’t the only metric when deciding whether to stump up. Having survived job loss, debt, divorce and a battle to keep her home after the financial crisis, Gaynor retrained as a psychiatric nurse and runs the Irish Budgeting Mammy Instagram account.Create a “teen sinking fund” to cover the miscellaneous spending, she advises. “I put money aside every time I get paid for those expenses,” says Gaynor. “One day, I got a request for a school hoodie to be paid for the next day. No one told me there would be a school hoodie, but I had that `miscellaneous’ money put aside.”Costly lessonRequests for money from the school come thick and fast, says Elaine*, a parent in a dual-income household in the midlands.“I have an 18-year-old boy and a 15-year-old girl. They are doing the Leaving Cert and Junior Cert this year, so it was a bit of a kick in the teeth to be asked to pay €100 each to sit the exams,” says Elaine.“Immediately after that, we got an email to pay the balance for transition year (TY). I don’t think the school lives in reality at all,” says Elaine.TY costs are a real bug bear, say members of the 74,000 strong Life on a Budget Facebook group who responded to an Irish Times call-out on the cost of teens.“I have to reiterate again, TY is really crazy expensive,” says Kay, a parent in the group. If you’re a Junior Cert parent, start putting money aside now. Some schools can charge about €420 upfront to cover most things, but excluding a trip abroad, costing about €700.Other schools charge less up front, with courses and experiences paid as they come up.There isn’t enough line of sight as to what’s coming up to help parents budget for it, says Elaine. Parents praise the free schoolbooks scheme but the cost of a tablet, if required, all but cancels out the saving. They report paying between €300 and €850 for a device, excluding insurance. When representing his school in sport, Elaine’s son has never had to pay for a bus to competitions, but her daughter does.“It’s a tenner every time the girls go for a match, which is steep. I think the school should really cover that if they are playing for the school,” says Elaine. A recent Junior Cert home economics field trip cost €35. “It’s actually hard because you think you are doing okay, then you are blindsided by this bloody bill that comes in,” she says.“I think it’s hard for everybody, and it’s hard for the likes of me with two incomes. We’re squeezed because we don’t get anything, we don’t get allowances. I think teachers really need to sit down, cop on and ask, ‘here is a cost-of-living crisis, is this really necessary?’” In Tina’s school, there is an adventure centre trip in second year, a TY trip abroad and a fifth-year trip too. “These are all optional, but you want to give them their memories,” she says.“There is more money going out of my account than there is coming into it at the moment,” says Tina. “We have savings, but we don’t want to dip into that. That’s why I’ve gone back to work full-time, so that we are not stressed about who needs to go on a school trip.” Grinds, the Gaeltacht and foreign language exchange trips can also add to the bills. ClothesPrescriptive school uniform policies add unnecessary pressure, says Áine, a parent from the Life on a Budget group. Her child will pay more than €300 for her first-year uniform, excluding “school” shoes and runners. “Coming from an Educate Together where there was no uniform or ‘school’ shoes, it’s a proper shock to the system. The expectation that families have the bandwidth for all these extras seems very out of touch,” she says. Despite the Department of Education urging schools over nine years ago to make uniforms more affordable by using generic, non-crested items, parents will this year face another back-to-school season without action. A back-to-school clothing and footwear allowance of €285 is limited to recipients of some social welfare payments or those below an income threshold. For a two-child family for example, the threshold is €804.70 a week. And 0 per cent VAT on children’s shoes stops at size 38. “My 13-year-old is in adult-sized shoes for so long I’m not sure if he ever wore kids’ size,” says Susan from the Life on a Budget group.“Lots of kids are out of the biggest kids’ sizes by fourth class these days,” she says.Sporting chanceTina’s children play several sports. In addition to annual club memberships, which for GAA is up to €300 for a family, the cost of a sporty teen has rocketed. The level of fitness and kit now required to “make the team”, especially a county team, comes at a price.“I don’t have gym membership myself but for my two oldest, we pay their gym membership,” says Tina. “It’s €40 offpeak for one of them and the other was €260 for the year.” The kit is pricey too, and she tries to teach the value of money. “My son with the hurls and boots, I say okay, but next pay cheque.”Elaine’s daughter is sports mad too. But with that comes injuries. “My daughter loves football, she’s really good, but she has broken an ankle, a foot, her wrist, fingers ... If they play sport, it’s the doctor’s fees, the physio and the MRIs. Make sure you have health insurance,” she says.Quick access to diagnostics often means going private, with consultant fees of €300, and a physio at up to €90 per session, says insurance expert, Dermot Goode, of healthinsuranceireland.ie.So-called “corporate” health insurance plans tend to offer the best cover for routine outpatient expenses, says Goode, typically including a 50 per cent refund on GP, consultant, physio and radiology fees, with a small excess, he says.Private MRI scans in approved centres are covered too, as are minor injury clinics for fractures, with a fee of about €75 per visit.Corporate plans typically cost €400-€450 per child, but the outpatient refunds can more than offset the cost, says Goode. Examples of plans with good outpatient refunds include the likes of VHI PMI 6610 at €431 per child; Laya Inspire Plus at €415 per child; Irish Life Health Action Plus at €440 per child; and Level Health Pro Plus Plan at €413 per child, he says.“You don’t have to insure all children on the same plan. You can all be on one policy, but on different plans to suit their needs,” says Goode. Basic cover can cost from €150-€250 per child.Ask your insurer about their best plans for outpatient refunds for the things you want covered, and which offer the highest cover at the lowest cost, says Goode.Batch eating When it comes to food, don’t come at Elaine with tips about batch cooking.“I have an 18-year-old, six-foot fellah; if you batch cook, he will batch-eat the whole lot in one sitting,” she says. “I go to bed early and then they descend on the kitchen, like locusts the two of them. If I put it in the fridge for tomorrow, it’s gone when I wake up.”She has no tips for parents, except to warn them. Tina says: “I tell my husband, I know you think the mortgage is the biggest bill, but it’s not. Food is the biggest bill.” Pocket moneyWhen it comes to cash, it is not so much about pocket money with teens, as reacting to expenses as they arise, parents say.“They will say, ‘I forgot my lunch, can I have money for the canteen or for a chicken fillet roll up town’, or ‘I need a haircut’, or ‘I’m going out with the girls after school on a Friday’ – it could be anything from €5 to €20,” says Tina.Revolut enables her to assign chores for payment, and she’s done that a few times.“I might be a bit disorganised, I don’t have a chart on the fridge, there isn’t a set amount every month. [But} when you break it down, it’s scary,” she says.“I would often say, ‘you’ve had a lot this week’. My kids are used to hearing that. I tell them, ‘not this month’ I have to have it in my bank account before I can give it to you’.”Elaine gives money as needed but her children don’t often ask, she says. Clothes, shoes and driving lessons are given for Christmas and birthdays.She recommends a Tesco Mobile deal which allows prepay customers to turn €5 in Clubcard vouchers into €15 top-up credit. It means her mobile phone bill is €5 a month. Ann Marie Gaynor’s boys have been able to get some part-time farm work, and she encourages them to save. “Learn to say ‘No, not this week’, she advises others. “Get them used to waiting.”“Explain why and how you are saving for it. Be honest about money. They are teenagers now but they are going into the world where they are going to have to look after their own money.”*Names have been changed for privacy.