Living in the small Italian city of Cuneo, around an hour south of regional hub Turin, Edd Baldry and his family can boast the “village” that many working parents in the UK complain they lack.
Living near his partner Elena’s parents and siblings, their two children, Allegra and Leo, aged seven and five, are growing up surrounded by their cousins, and spending quality time with their grandparents.
Financially, it’s also balancing out more favourably than their life in the UK for London-born Edd, 41, and former Cuneo local Elena, 40, who met Edd in London in 2011.
In Bristol, where they had moved to in 2015 to be in between Edd’s father in London and mother in Devon, Edd and Elena were paying £2,600 a month in nursery fees – full-time for Allegra and four days a week for Leo. They also faced a £1,600 monthly mortgage bill on top of that.
And so for Edd and Elena, a three-week trip to Cuneo in summer 2020 during a period of eased Covid lockdown restrictions had the couple looking at the maths and questioning their future in the UK.
“We realised that we didn’t really have the support network that we initially thought we did in the UK, compared to the classic Italian family life of very present grandparents, and our kids’ cousins being the same age as them.
“We started to really understand the saying, ‘it takes a village’,” Edd recalls.
“We went out for a drink with a friend whose kids were a few years older than ours. We were talking about money, and we asked them how much their expenses were in Italy, and I didn’t believe them at first – I thought they were just winding me up,” he says.
Those costs – around £250 to have both children in an Italian nursery full-time, and around £320 a month to rent a four bedroom house in Cuneo, which has since become around £600 in a monthly mortgage, convinced them it was time to sell their house in Bristol, and move to Cuneo.
They made this move a year later, in 2021.
Edd successfully works from home running his business, Make Sense of It, a tech consultancy for charities, while Elena is the managing director for corporate services at Startup Bootcamp, working on a hybrid basis out of the organisation’s Milan hub.
Allegra is now in an Italian state school, so while the family’s nursery fees have reduced they have been replaced by a meal supplement.
But the extra cost of this is just £100 a month – for a three-course daily school dinner. Life, by all accounts, is good.
“I remember being terrified about defaulting on our house in the UK, or one of us not being able to work because the maths didn’t add up with the nursery fees. Now, we have healthy savings and money we’ve put away for a rainy day,” says Edd.
Edd and Elena are part of the 74 per cent of UK parents struggling with nursery costs, according to a poll by global children’s charity Theirworld.
The UK is the third most expensive country in the world for childcare, according to the OECD.
Only New Zealand and Switzerland are more expensive.
Estimates from Moneyhelper suggest the average cost of sending a child under the age of two to nursery in Great Britain is: £302.10 a week full-time or £157.68 a week part-time.
The British Expat Report 2024, a survey of over 1,500 UK adults and 500 British expats, found that 39 per centof UK adults cite the cost of living crisis for considering moving abroad. 38 per cent of expats say they’ve never regretted moving abroad, with 49 per cent reporting that their mental health has improved.
For Edd and Elena, this definitely seems to be the case.
“We’re going to Denmark and Sweden on holiday – we wouldn’t have been able to afford that before. We’ve been able to pay our mortgage off more quickly. When we go to the supermarket, we’re not having to do that awful mental arithmetic to stay under a certain budget,” says Edd.
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