The £5000 a year plan

I try not to talk about how little money I live on with the people I know, because they are usually a little incredulous.  Complaining about lack of money, particularly being dependent upon size of stipend, is a common grad student conversation.  European and UK DPhil students here tend to have their tuition and fees paid for and a stipend slightly under £13,000/year.  Since I dream of being in that position, again, I try not to talk about my financial situation with my peers.

However, I don’t mind sharing it with you all.  Hopefully you will even find it helpful!

So this is the plan:

• £3600 on rent (at £300/month on a 12 month lease)
• £1400 on everything else

Now obviously that £3600 is a totally fixed cost, there is nothing I can do about it.  So the £1400 is the really interesting part, what this blog is actually about.  It’s slightly more than £100/month for food, travel, entertainment, and everything else.*

*I have one great cheat in all of this, which is that my parents will pay for my plane tickets back to America at Christmastime.  So transatlantic flights won’t be factoring into this (or else, given where I am from, I would already be halfway out of money).  However, I will talk about those flights and how to find the cheapest ones in a later post just in case you need them.

~ by starvinggradstudent on 23 September, 2008.