Tuesday, January 24, 2012

We be Poor Folks

We just got our student aid back.  And it's already spent.  Does anyone else burn through their money as fast as we do? 

Trust me.  It's not like I have a hole in my pocket.  We're pretty frugal.  We rarely go on dates.  The last one was in December.  Before that, was in August.  We didn't have a super fancy Christmas.  We don't have glamorous anniversaries by any means.  I'm pretty good at staying away from Target.  We take advantage of free activities.   

Maybe you could lend me some help with this financial thing.  Or maybe you're going through the same problem too.  Maybe we could help each other out here.   So I'm going to be honest about this whole money situation.  Really. 

So once the school gets its chunk of money for Mav, we get the remainder for living expenses.  It's about $11,000.  $11,000 for the semester, January 1 through July 1.  Roughly, $1800 per month to live on.  $650 of it goes to rent.  $310 goes towards a car payment.  We spend about $250, probably more, for bills: phones, utilities, car insurance.  We're up to $1,210 with rent, car payment and bills.  This doesn't count for gas for the cars, diapers, groceries or fun.  Wait, what's fun? 

I'm sure you're wondering how we afford to live.  Let me answer that question.  Credit cards!  Credit cards have saved our hineys.  But it's also going to get the best of us.  See.  Between our cards, we have a balance of about $6,000.  And we have to make payments with the remaining money for the month. 

Here's where we're scared.  We're pretty close to maxing out.  Then what?  What do we do?  The bank will laugh in our faces if we say we want  need a larger limit on our cards.

Luckily, I guess, we have the option of taking out more loans for fourth year.  But this is to cover interviewing expenses and moving.  And that is expensive. 

So by graduation, we will have racked up about $250,000 or so in student aid, in addition to maybe another $10,000 in credit card debt.  That's a grand total of $260,000.  Not counting interest, people! 

See the reason for my anxiety. 

I would love some input.  How do you survive?  Do you just push through it?  Is there some sort of trick?  Is this normal? 

3 comments:

  1. Um. I went back to school so we could get extra student aid. :(

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  2. Andrea! I found your blog! It is super real and fun! Love it!

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  3. I learned to cut cost everywhere. We never go out to eat, okay on the rare occasion. We don't use disposable stuff like scrubbies, I also make our laundry soap/dishwasher soap. We have littles and we use cloth diapers (those bad boys are awesome) I became as my sister calls it crunchy. I also make every single Christmas gift we give. I learned to knit, to make jewelry and to make homemade sugar scrub in addition to all of the above. It is still tight, but we survive.

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