Budgeting: When It’s Not Enough to Refrain from Getting Toys

I always thought budgeting meant looking at your income, crunching some numbers, and making sure you spend less than you earn, with some money left over for savings if at all possible. The thing is, in graduate school, it is literally impossible to spend less than you earn. Last semester I made around $400 a month at my federal work study job. Even if I could find a place in Chicago to rent at that price (it would be hours from school, and I’d probably get shot on my way to the train), well, there goes my ENTIRE INCOME to rent. Hungry? Too bad, asshole! You don’t have twenty bucks for a month’s supply of absolutely nutrition-free ramen noodles. If you had twenty bucks, you spent it on electricity so you wouldn’t have to study in the corner of Starbucks, praying no one would notice that you didn’t buy coffee. Oh, and I hope you weren’t planning to do laundry, ever.

You should never pay more than 33 cents for these. 24 cents if you can wait for a sale.

Fortunately, I’m a child of privilege. No, I don’t have a trust fund, but I guess you could say I’m a 529 plan baby. My parents put away a lot of money for my education, and thanks to my college’s generous financial aid, there’s just enough left to pay my rent until I’m out on internship. They cover my phone bill, too, bless them (though I don’t have a smartphone or a data plan).

You might think that $400 a month would be plenty for non-rent essentials. I thought so, anyway. It turns out there’s more to budgeting money than budgeting money: you’ve got to budget time, too. If you want to save money on food, you’ve got to allocate time for grocery shopping and cooking, time for preparing lunch to bring to school.  That’s all well and good at the beginning of the semester, when morale is high and work load is relatively low. When midterms hit, and you’re having enough trouble concentrating even when you’re just sitting and staring at your Word document, when you’re constantly tired and constantly anxious, the idea of stepping away from your work for an hour or two to cook and eat just feels impossible. To me, anyway. I know it can all be managed, because one of my classmates keeps posting pictures on Facebook of the meals she cooks for herself and her husband.

This is what she looks like.

On the other hand, there are the classmates who apparently go out to a restaurant once a week. Seriously, how the hell are you people doing it? I can only guess they’re using student loans, or maybe they’re just more privileged than I am in parental resources. Student loans for living expenses make budgeting weird. I cannot get my brain to accept that student loan money goes on the “income” side of the budget equation. It’s imaginary money! Like the spending limit on your credit card! It’s negative money. It’s ex money. It’s pining for the federal coffers.

If you don’t know why this is here, who are you and why are you reading my blog?

I joined Mint.com in an effort to manage my money better. It told me what I already knew: I overspend on food. It isn’t enough to refrain from buying the Apple products and caramel macchiatos that my non graduate school friends (and, inexplicably, some of my graduate school classmates) seems to enjoy. I need to get back to cooking. I was much better about cooking and packing lunch during my first semester. I also got much worse grades during my first semester. I think this is a more valid correlation than the boyfriend/grades correlation my dad keeps talking about, especially since the boyfriend is still around and I’m now getting As.