$5 a day for coffee. $40 a week for gas. $100 a week for food. Rent, car payments, cell phone bills…. The list of expenses seems to go on and on.

And that doesn’t even include the hundreds of dollars spent on books, parking passes and organizational fees every semester.

Then, to top it all off, there is the thousands of dollars scraped together to pay to attend school in the first place…. $8,088 per year for in state undergraduates, to be exact.

But at the end of the day, we seem to find a way to make due because we have to pay for all of these things… don’t we?

Every year we hear the same old complaints. And probably do some of the complaining ourselves. “I can’t believe I spent hundreds of dollars on a parking pass.” “I can’t believe this food is so expensive.”

And with all these things to pay for, it’s important that we make priorities as to where our money goes.

A budget is “an invaluable tool to help you prioritize your spending and manage your money- no matter how much or how little you have,” according to Duke University’s personal finance website.

Planning a budget helps students recognize wasteful expenditures, adapt faster when financial situations change and achieve financial goals in the end.

Regardless, I guess we all just better hope, and in some cases pray, that when all is said and done, the time we’ve spent racking up debt to get by in college is able to pay itself off in what we have been able to take from the experience.

For the ins and outs of how to survive on a college budget, visiting NKU’s Financial Fitness website.
http://sac.nku.edu/services/financialfitness.html