I realize there is no one answer to this question, but ideas/thoughts apprciated.
Our son is off to college in August. Like all Freshmen, he’ll be staying in a dorm and we’ve signed him up for a more-than-adequate food plan. He won’t have a car as they are prohibited for Freshmen. The school, Northern Arizona University, is in Flagstaff, which is not as expensive as cities like New Yourk, DC or Chicago.
All this said, I’d appreciate any thoughts/ideas on how much I should provide him for “spending” money. I was thinking somewhere in the range of $150.00 per month, Too much? Too little?
I’m pretty sure my parents gave me $0. The expectation was that I would save money over the summers and/or work part time on campus. I’d be inclined to take the same approach with my kids.
If I remember correctly, after all my bills (insurance, cell phone, etc.) I think I had about 150-200/month leftover for spending money, but things like gas, ink cartridges, and general school supplies also came out of it. I had an unlimited meal plan that was almost 24/7. While it wasn’t enough money to go partying every night, I still managed to have fun on the weekends. If his first semester is anything like mine was though, he won’t have much time for partying if he wants to make decent grades.
Maybe you could start him off low and tell him to let you know if he needs more? Or perhaps you could set up a joint bank account that you feed money into, so you could track whether your monthly supply is going to “Al’s Wine and Spirits” or if he is actually using it on real needs. Of course he could just go to the ATM, but it would be worth a shot.
Have you considered basing it on how much he himself manages to save from his summer wages?
Of course, you’d have to be aware of what he was making (net) at the summer job, and come to a reasonable amount, of that, you feel he could save. Add up the total amount you expect him to take away to college (of his wages) and decide if you need to top it up and by about how much.
Then, make it clear, if he doesn’t make your conservative target for his saving, your top up will be minimal. Should he exceed your target, your top up will be more generous. There is no better lesson he could learn, during these years, than how to save money.
Once graduated, in the mainstream workforce, earning a good salary, is no time to try and convince someone they need to understand about saving.
It depends a bit on the school. There was unending free entertainment at my school. Occasionally I’d go see a movie or out for dinner, so less than $10/week? This was less than 10 years ago. My parents often asked if I needed money (they preferred I not work, although I did a little bit), but I never needed it.
The summer employment savings is a good one. Certainly worth a try, but jobs are really tough to find right now. He’s looking, but no success thus far.
What bills are you turning over to him (cell phone?). What fees and such won’t be covered by tutition that you won’t cover? What sort of income does he have independent of his parents allowance.
$5 a day was difficult even for me (I’m very frugal) twenty five years ago. I ended up working part time as well. You don’t want to make it impossible to live, but you do want to keep it frugal. And personally, I think a college kids “social” expense should not be funded by mom and dad. Get a job, sell your plasma, figure out a way to budget.
I’m inclined to agree with this response. Personally, my parents gave me $200/month my first year at college, which might seem like a lot, but when you factor in the above variables, it really doesn’t leave much left for anything other than the occasional dinner and a movie night. I budgeted mine to allow for a couple weekends of fun, some school supplies (including one trip in a taxi to WalMart at 2AM because I’d found I was out of aforementioned printer ink), and the occasional clothing purchase.
For me, I’d start him somewhere around there and gauge his usage and what he’s purchasing over some time. Trust me, he’ll let you know if it’s not enough.
IIRC, my parents paid for my dorm and my meal plan. Everything else I paid for out of my own pocket using money I’d earned the previous summer, and credit cards I paid off with my jobs in subsequent summers.
I wasn’t the most exciting of college students, tho. So this worked out just fine for me.
How about lawn mowing this summer as his own summer business? Or if you have neighbors with late elementary school/middle school age kids who need childcare, summer nanny? If a RESPONSIBLE teenage neighbor showed up at my door with a proposal to watch my kids for the summer right now - well, I’ve already lined up Grandma for the job, but it would be really tempting to have a teenager with access to a car - because Grandma doesn’t do the waterpark as a field trip.
Are you including textbooks and other academic expenses in “spending money”? If so, make sure he has enough for that!
That depends on things like how much there is to do on and around campus that’s free or cheap, and how much spending money the people he hangs around with have, and how maturally thrifty he is. It’s entirely possible to have a rich and full social life on some campuses without spending much at all.
Whatever the correct number is, he should have enough money for some, but not all, of the things he wants to do or have—that’s how people learn to budget, plan, save, and make choices. And I’m all for him earning some or all of his spending money himself, as long as it leaves him enough time and energy for both the academic and non-academic parts of the college experience.
I have 3 kids in college right now in Bloomington-Normal and Champaign-Urbana, IL. We pay state school tuition, the equivalent of dorm room and meal plan, books and fees. Through age 22 we also pay for their cell phones, coverage and copays on our health insurance, vision and dental, and their coverage to be insured on our cars. And we pay for bus/train fare or gas money to and from school 2x/semester. (Yeah - they have a sweet deal. To their credit, they appreciate it.)
So they are responsible for their clothes, supplies, toiletries, and recreation. We have required that work since they turned 16. We’ve stressed the importance of budgeting, and not one of them budgets $100 a month. IIRC, one of them stays within a budget of $50 a month. Even I have asked him if he isn’t being a little too tight. But he studies hard, seems to find plenty of opportunities to party and blow off steam, and has goals of saving his money for other purposes down the line.
Beware of pushing college kids - particularly newbie freshmen - into working part-time *during *the school year. When I was in school a couple of my friends’ parents did that, and their grades really suffered as a result.
When you’re in school, you have 4 options: you can work, you can study, you can sleep, and you can party. However, you can really only do 2 out of the 4 well at any given time. Maybe 2.5, max.
I wouldn’t use that kind of yardstick. I went to a place where nothing much was going on, and I didn’t do many social things, but there was enough on campus to live for free for weeks at a time. Of course I didn’t do that. I was able to have a car, and bought as many CDs, books, and DVDs as I wanted. My roommate, though, did not have a car and used very little money.
However, I would think about having him get a summer job. That’s what I did, and saved up for each semester.
I had a trust fund that paid for the tuition, food plan and school supplies [no computers at the time, but it paid my books, class supplies and any SCHOOL required supplies and field trips. It also paid for a basic wardrobe, any medication I needed during the school year glasses and so forth.]
I worked summers and after classes for any spending money i needed.
Freshman year, I was on the “full” meal plan, and got no spending money other than my savings. After that I went to a the cheapest meal plan (which basically would cover lunch and the occasionally dinner if I was feeling lazy) at great cost savings to my parents, and they gave me $125/mo for groceries.
Starting my second semester, I had a steady 10 hr/week part time job (first in the library, later working for a professor) that gave me about $40 week spending cash, and I would getoccasional gigs through the Theatre Department. I was an “outside events PA,” meaning, when touring groups came through, I was “as-needed” stage hand. usually good for 2 minor $50 jobs a semester and 2 intensive but renumerative “$200” jobs a year (the Nutcracker at Christmas, and the NYC Opera in Feburary).
This was in 1993-97. There is so much stuff to do free/cheap on campus, and at least at my university, there was more house-party partying (cheap) and less going-out-to-bars partying (expensive).
ETA: for jobs before school starts, he should look into being a sleepaway summer camp counsellor. It’s fun, you get in shape, its always in demand, and since you are at camp 99% of the time, you don’t spend any money. It pays about 1500-2500 for the summer, and he’ll take most of that with him.
That’s the thing about the “find a job” attitude, though. Not to harp on you or any one person in particular, but far too often the response from the galley is “tell the kid to find a job.” That was hard enough years ago, and I can imagine much harder today.
A lot of parents would be “tempted” and “find it nice” to have a responsible teenage babysitter. A lot of people would love to be able to pay someone to mow their lawn. But depending on where you live, no one may be willing to pay for that kind of work out of their own pocket now. And if you find someone who is willing to fork out the cash, chances are they’ve already hired your competition from math class.
Actual jobs are even harder to come by for young adults, with so many actual adults taking anything opening up on the market for a while now. This is even more true of a small college town, where student jobs off campus are few and far between, and most taken on day one.
I’m not saying the kid shouldn’t have a job. By all means, if time allows, go for it. My college strongly warned against freshmen carrying jobs, though, and I know that if I had a job my first year, I wouldnt’ve made the grades that I did. If he’s able to find something over the summer, I would highly encourage him to take it, but not to rely on it to provide enough income to float through the first year at school.
If you have a theme park nearby, that’s one of the few sure-shot goldmines for recently graduated kids – at my high school, everyone graduated to theme park work for the summer before shipping off to college. And although cliches of paper routes, babysitting and lawnmowing sound like great summer jobs, depending on where you live, those simply may not be options at all.
Everyone’s experience differs. We live in the suburbs west of Chicago and while in high school and during the summers my kids were all able to obtain part-time work at the local library, Dairy Queen, Coldstone Creamery, and the village Department of Public Works. Maybe we were just lucky, but we required that they keep applying to jobs until they got one - even if it was a job other than what they might most like to do. Helped to have the kids have good school records, be reasonably clean and well groomed, and display acceptable attitudes/manners.
Once they got part-time jobs while in high school, they were able to obtain additional hours during summers, and return to the jobs when home for summer from college. None of them resorted to the baby-sitting, lawncare, caddying, tho those options were always available.
We have dissuaded the kids from working while at school, tho my youngest has said she was thinking about putting in some applications if she did not get a research position. My oldest stayed down at school during the summer between junior and senior year, and obtained 4 part-time jobs, 3 of which she still does during the school year.
Freshman year (2002), my parents discouraged me from working, and gave me $20/week. Surprisingly, that was sufficient. I was on a meal plan and didn’t go out much, so that probably helped - but for the most part, $20/week covered my expenses pretty well. Occasionally, I needed extra money for nerd things (like Model UN), and my parents gave it to me as needed. Because they trusted me to be a giant nerd. (Good grief.)
Starting sophomore year, I earned most of my spending money with campus gigs - tutoring, PC tech work, and so on.
Important note: I went to a small suburban school, some distance from the nearest big city (Providence). There simply wasn’t much to do off-campus, so there wasn’t much to spend money on. If your kid is going to school in a larger city, he’ll probably need more money if he’s to get out and about - and you probably want him to do that. Big cities have amazing cultural opportunities - theater, museums, bizarre restaurants, and so on. These are great supplements to an education (one of the reasons I liked law school much, much more than college), and you don’t want your kid just hanging out in his dorm room. (That being said, there’s nothing wrong with just telling him to earn his own spending money).