Why/how do living expenses go up upon entering the real world

In My Humble Opinion
21

A short estimate of my monthly expenses (single guy, living along, Minneapolis, MN):

Rent: $800
Utilities/Cable/Internet: $140
Car payment: $300
Car Insurance: $100 (not exactly sure, I pay it once every 6 months because it’s cheaper that way)
Student Loans: $100 (didn’t have much for loans, thank God)
Food: $150-$200
Cell Phone: $40 (I don’t have a landline)
Misc necessary crap: (stamps, cleaning supplies, laundry, …): $50

So, just looking at these numbers, I’ve spent approximately $1600-$1700. I take home around $2000 a month after taxes, which leaves me wtih $300 a month for entertainment, The Girlfriend, savings, new computer toys, and any “oh shit” expenses.

About the only way I could save money out of this would be to get a roommate.
But I like living by myself though, I don’t have to arrange my life around someone else’s cleanliness habits.

22

My monthly expenses when I was in college and living at home:

Gas: $40
Lunch: $50

Just for comparison.

23

Somehow expenses manage to expand to fill your income. I lived quite comfortably off $3k a year when I graduated. I lived with two other guys in a house shared with our landlord and his girlfriend for $350 a month ea. I had an old beater car. Even had a little left over for going out in Boston a fair amount.

I made over twice that now after I finished business school. But I also live in NYC where you can’t find places for less than $1200 a month. No car though.

Entertainment ends up being a big expense. In college, we paid fraternity dues of $300 a semester. 35 guys x $300 buys a lot of beer for parties. Occassionally, we would go out to local bars for $8 pitchers of $10 all you can drink specials. In the real world, a night out can cost $100 in a big city. When you get out into the real world, your tastes change. You want to drink imported beers instead of crappy Schlitz Light in a can. You want to go out to eat to nice reetaurants instead of eating cafeteria food or Pondarosa all-you-can-eat buffet.

24

I live in an independent apartment though, not a dorm. If i lived the same way i do now when i graduate then

electricity
water and sewage
television (cable or satellite)
heating
garbage disposal
cooking fuel(?)
internet
Food expenses
Beer, other alcohol
Entertainment:
movies
dining out
special events (concerts, etc…)
hobbies and interests
Furniture
Home repair

Would all be the same cost as they are now. Taxes would go up but it was my understanding that local taxes were not that high (perhaps im wrong). I dont have medical or life insurance right now. Don’t plan on getting life insurance but i’ll need medical someday. with a $2500 deductible and a basic plan that should run me $50 or so a month.

25

Wow that’d be one heck of a medical plan. I’m not sure where you live but I’ve never heard of such a thing here in the states… If you do find it you’re extremely lucky.

I’ve only known 4 people who have ever purchased health coverage outside an employer plan. None of them have plans that are cheaper than 500/month and they have huge deductibles too.

26

Odd. when i check ehealthinsurance.com it says a high deductible plan for me would be $35 or so a month.

I live in bloomington indiana. dont know if that $35/month is just a fluke or if its because its the midwest or what.

27

They don’t have anything in my area … and I really was hopeful. I know one family who purchase insurance for their child only since family coverage would be far too expensive and thought that site might be the answer to their problems.

It may indeed be cheaper in Indiana though because all states have different rules about what is required for coverage. MA requires a lot from insurers and much of it is very expensive like fertility treatments.

Is that their grab you and intice you quote or does that ask for a full medical history?

28

im sure its a ‘grab and entice’ quote.

29

nod helps if I can spell too eh?

I’d be interested to see how the rate changes based on age and health conditions.

btw… congrats on your impending graduation :slight_smile:

30

Well, there are lots of little things that can add up really quickly. You’re driving more, so you’re spending more on gas and oil changes and tires. If you have to pay tolls on your commute, that adds up really freaking fast. Ditto if you have to pay parking, as the days of paying $100 a semester to park in the stadium lot on campus are gone. Your parents drop you off their car insurance, so you have to pay for your own policy, which is more expensive than your part of their multicar policy. Plus, since you’re driving more, your rates go up even more.

If you move out of the dorm, you have to have all the kitchen stuff you never needed before. Plates, bowls, glasses, silverware, pots and pans, dishtowels, salt, pepper, mustard, etc. Even if you collect this stuff at garage sales and the Dollar Store, it can add up to a fair bit of money. Same for furniture. You need at minimum something to sleep on and something to sit on, and unless you’re scavenging things off the side of the road, it’s going to cost you some money.

You can’t go around in tattered jeans and concert tshirts anymore, you need suits and ties and heels and hose, or scrubs and labcoats, or whatever. Your office attire needs dry-cleaning, and that adds up. Same for all that stain remover to get the blood and vomit out of your scrubs and labcoat.

You discover that you’re bloody sick of peanut butter and ramen noodles, and you want some real food. Ramen noodles range from .10 to .30 a package, whereas ground beef is $1.50 a pound.

You can’t go to Student Health and take a few days off class when you get sick. You have to go the doctor and pay a $10-$20 copay, and you have to take time off work. If you don’t have paid sick leave, your income for that pay period goes down the toilet. You can’t get antibiotics from the school clinic for $5, you have to go to the regular pharmacy and pay $20. Your birth control pills that cost $6 from the school clinic are $30 now. If you have chronic conditions like asthma or epilepsy or hypothyroidism or depression, your medical costs skyrocket.

It’s mostly little stuff, $5 here and $40 there every month, but it can mount up amazingly quickly.

31

I’ve got a $50 a month plan here in Atlanta from Blue Cross/Blue Shield, all by myself. It wound up being cheaper than Student Health’s plan and with better coverage.

32

I agree w/ haardvark, number 1 culprit is the power of new Stuff.
Your classic Diderot effect- You move, you get a few new things you can’t live without, and suddenly your old stuff become disgusting in your sight, so you replace the most disgusting bits, which immediately highlight how actually disgusting the stuff you could live with last week is, etc and so on.

You could keep this up until you die with very little effort (but prob quite a bit of debt).

And number 2 is, you get older and no longer have the intestinal fortitude to hurl yourself into new experiences like living with 5 roomates and one bathroom, and seeing how much blood you can donate without becoming totally transparent.

Because not the least of what you learn from all the fun new experiences are exactly which ones you’ll never do again.

Now I know that the more people I live with, the more I hate humanity, and that Aldi brand generic coffee is the most vile substance on the planet. Therefore the Big List of Non-Negotiable Demands has been amended to include “No Roomates” and “Get The Good Coffee, Damnit” where it joins such perenial classics as “I’ll Never Live With My Parents Again” and “There is No Such Thing As An Acceptable Number of Cockroaches”.

33

HealthyNY.com - offers applications for health plans for NY residents for less than $200 a month.

34

thank god i live in the midwest. My brother’s wife’s parents looked at a 4 bedroom in town for about $95k. Homes go as low at $45k where i lived.

8k doesnt pay tuition and living expenses anymore. Tuition alone at a state university is about $6000 a year.

35

For us, the most immediate expenses were a doubling of rent and paying car insurance ourselves. In college, my in-laws paid our car insurance for us, but as soon as we had a job, we took over the payments. Rent went from $250/month to over $500/month.

Some other expenses:

  1. A decent bed. All we slept on in college was a mattress on the floor.
  2. We also bought a washer and dryer. We’d learned to detest public laundry facilities and the washer and dryer were purchased before any other furniture besides the bed.
  3. Medical insurance. We went without it in college (meaning I suffered a cracked ankle without going to the doctor).
  4. Savings and retirement accounts. As soon as we were able, we started various types of savings, including a savings account, IRA and 401(k).
  5. Better food. Homemade fried rice, Ramen noodles and free take-home from the various restaurants we’d worked at were a bit tiring after a few years of it.
  6. Decent car. Our car was on its last legs, so we had to start making payments on another one.

I couldn’t live on a gross income of $3000/month now, 7 years after graduation, but mostly that’s because we have a house payment of over $1000/month. We don’t even live in an especially nice house. It’s 34 years old, firmly middle class, and needs quite a bit of work.

36

It’s not so much what you can live on, it’s what you want to live on. If, god forbid, we had to, we could go back to living in a roach infested apartment in a scary neighborhood, having a roomate in addition to a spouse, eating of the value menu at Taco Bell, making a hundred dollars worth of Wal-mart clothes last a year or more, making excuses for not going out with our friends whenever they went to a bar or got married out of state, waiting til a book makes it to paperback and then to the used bookstore before we read it. We could do all that, and be happy. But we don’t want to.

We enjoy having a house that’s ours, taking the occasional trip without freaking out over hotel charges, buying the boneless skinless chicken breasts, being able to sometimes buy a book when it first comes out, being able to buy nice presents for friends when they get married, being able to occasionally pick up the tab for the whole dinner when we visit friends or friends visit us.

It’s really just about what you want, and what isn’t important to you. My brother wanted a much bigger fancy house than me and a great many more luxuries, and wasn’t emotionally invested in any particular carreer, so he went into a field that would allow him to support that life style. My other brother doesn’t mind the “student” lifestyle and is emotionally invested in a low-key, low-stress, highly creative lifestyle, so he got a degree in art and supports himself as an intermitant handyman and still lives like a student. I lucked out and was emotionally invested in a career–teaching–that happened to support me at about where I want to be–somewhere between those two extremes. All of us are happy and all of us made the best choice for us.

So if someone is saying “you can’t live on so little once you are not a student” as a way to discourage you from pursuing a poorly-paying passion, well, that’s BS. But I will say that once you are not a student the poverty can become tiring, so if you are giving up the possibility of any sort of finacial well being for the sake of a particular career, make sure that your love of whatever it is is great enough to offset what you are giving up.

37

One thing that happens is the “I see it, I make enough to afford it, I buy it” mentality…even when you don’t make enough to afford it.

You live in college for years off of a couple thousand (plus dorm a food) a year. Suddenly, $40k a year looks like a hell of a lot of money.

So you start thinking…I still have my high school stereo, I’ve always wanted a nicer one…and you buy it.

Gee, I never really took a good vacation while I was in college…and you take one.

I never got to eat out nice when I was in college … and you do it.

Then there are the things you didn’t think about. Taxes. The part of your health insurance your employer expects you to pay. Someone said you should toss money into a 401k and you do. All making that $40k a year much smaller.

And the additional expenses of life outside college. Most people don’t continue living a college lifestyle once they leave college. They dump the roommates (at least the ones they aren’t having sex with). Find that things like spices in the spice cabinet, matching dishes, and good sheets on the bed are nice to have. Want matching towels in the bathroom (I remember having one towel in college - a beach towel - that I used for everything and washed every so often).

Suddenly, you are looking at $40k not going very far and wondering where you are spending all your money.

38

ANother thing that happens is that you lose the network of fellow starving students who watch out for eah other, and of realitives who know you are poor and keep you in mind.

For example: at one point when I was in school I had three used microwaves sitting in my closet. Why? Because a $100 microwave is a major purchase in college, so whenever I was offered a used one by family or friends, I took it. I redistributed those microwaves over the next year or so to various friends when their microwaves broke.

The mattresses we had in college we all hand-me-downs, and when we upgrade d to a better set of hand-me-down mattressses, we handed down the ones we had.

Computers, computer parts, clothes, small appliances, furniture–when you are in college people who are geting rid of these things call you and ask if you want them. You have a network of friends who know what you need and keep an eye peeled. After you graduate, all that dries up. All your friends have poor younger realitives of their own to pass things down to, and your own realitives are passing things down to the younger cousins, who are themselves going off to school.

39

To echo what CrazyCatLady said, there are a ton of little things that you need when you live on your own that you just sort of take for granted when you are living at home. When you are living with your folks, you never consider all the tools and supplies and small appliances that are just there. And when you move out, you know that you’ll have to pay rent and utilities and for food, and that you’ll need a certain amount of furniture and cookware, but you usually underestimate how many other little things you’re going to need. You’ll need Saran wrap and garbage cans and vacuum bags and extension cords and and and… If you ever have people over at all, you’ll need more dishes and some tea bags, and and extra blankets and towels if anyone sleeps over. All of this stuff adds up.

40

Another thing is the social pressure. I think it is something less than “keeping up with the Jonses.” When people graduate from college and start making money, their standard of living improves. Certainly most grads earn more after than during college. And there is nothing wrong with a person improving their standard of living - even if that is simply defined as buying more stuff - when their income increases.

Now, if the majority of your friends step up their expenditures, it can be awkward to be the odd man out. You have to decide on which invites to decline, because you can’t/don’t want to pay the price of dinner, theater tix, etc. You will have to come to grips with getting the rep of the guy with the beater car/dump apartment/etc. And if you always let your buddies pick up the tab, some of them will start to consider you a mooch. So do you seek out a new circle of friends?

Slightly different facet, once you get used to a certain income, I think it would be VERY hard to reduce your lifestyle. I earn a very comfortable living, but hate my job. A career in the field I think I would enjoy would pay maybe 30% of my current salary. I could have enjoyed such a lifestyle if I had gone into it 20 years ago after being a pretty poor student. But I would imagine it being quite difficult to accept the reduction.