Re:Want to Help People? Just Give Them Money
by bane on Friday March 29, 2013 @07:50PM
(#5463679)
Great experience by the way.
I'll break this down one by one.
$900/month is a lot for students. - I agree, had I been single I would have split a room like that with somebody else for $450. However, I wasn't and my "roommate" wasn't allowed to work the first two years we were married.
I decided to go to school in small city instead of a large one because I knew it would be cheaper to live there. - You don't always get a choice where to go to school, sometimes you have to go where both of you have been accepted. I've broken how tuition worked for us down elsewhere https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3753975
By sharing rooms with 4 other students, I only paid between $325/month to 375/month. This was including, heat, water, power etc. In theory, it doesn't sound like where you lived was all that much less expensive than where I lived per person.
Did you have cable TV or internet? Cut it. You spend minimum $40 on it. - Agreed, we had no cable, no internet, no phones of any kind for the first two years.
Did you ever eat out? Never do it. You can save $1000/month there. - Agreed, when we ate out it was unavoidable, and it was taco bell, the cheapest thing on the menu. Elsewhere in this thread I've given some sample "recipes" of what we ended up eating when times were a rougher than normal. I still don't really like ketchup to this day all that much.
You mentioned that you drove. - 100% paid for, unavoidable, public transport wasn't good, was expensive, and biking/walking would have eaten up hours per day that could have been used for working/studying.
Sell the car. Car costs much more money that you think. - We sold one of them the second February to make rent and buy groceries. When my wife got her work permit, we had to limit where she could work to sync with where I worked or we'd spend too much time driving around and eating up fuel.
We would have sold furniture too, but we didn't have any :( Other than a used mattress somebody donated to us, we had a couple frying pans, some old clothes and an old computer. When we got married we had about $150 in the bank.
I'll break this down one by one.
$900/month is a lot for students. - I agree, had I been single I would have split a room like that with somebody else for $450. However, I wasn't and my "roommate" wasn't allowed to work the first two years we were married.
I decided to go to school in small city instead of a large one because I knew it would be cheaper to live there. - You don't always get a choice where to go to school, sometimes you have to go where both of you have been accepted. I've broken how tuition worked for us down elsewhere https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3753975
By sharing rooms with 4 other students, I only paid between $325/month to 375/month. This was including, heat, water, power etc. In theory, it doesn't sound like where you lived was all that much less expensive than where I lived per person.
Did you have cable TV or internet? Cut it. You spend minimum $40 on it. - Agreed, we had no cable, no internet, no phones of any kind for the first two years.
Did you ever eat out? Never do it. You can save $1000/month there. - Agreed, when we ate out it was unavoidable, and it was taco bell, the cheapest thing on the menu. Elsewhere in this thread I've given some sample "recipes" of what we ended up eating when times were a rougher than normal. I still don't really like ketchup to this day all that much.
You mentioned that you drove. - 100% paid for, unavoidable, public transport wasn't good, was expensive, and biking/walking would have eaten up hours per day that could have been used for working/studying.
Sell the car. Car costs much more money that you think. - We sold one of them the second February to make rent and buy groceries. When my wife got her work permit, we had to limit where she could work to sync with where I worked or we'd spend too much time driving around and eating up fuel.
We would have sold furniture too, but we didn't have any :( Other than a used mattress somebody donated to us, we had a couple frying pans, some old clothes and an old computer. When we got married we had about $150 in the bank.