This past month has been extremely hectic, as I spent most of it helping out freshers at my college.  Being new to Oxford — not to mention the UK, for many of them — can be a pretty disorienting and, with the weather being cloudy about half the time, depressing experience.  Hopefully I’ve managed to make at least some of them feel more welcome!

On to the spending.  After reading my first spending post, I realized that it was really boring and wondered who would ever want to read about the minutiae of my life that way!  Instead, I thought I might just describe my general financial circumstances, and then offer some tips about general categories of things in other posts.

I got hit with my rent bill, as well as my first term’s tuition bill, recently.  On the plus side, my loans came through at a time when the pound was down about 20% relative to the dollar from where it has been in the past.  This is a shocking drop.  Check out what the pound has been doing. That chart is awesome to play with, by the way, so definitely check it out.  Here’s a more basic image:

Over the past year.

At any rate, this means that my loan cheques (and all of you other Americans at Oxford on loans too!) arrived at a somewhat auspicious time — my college switched them into pounds between the $1.70 and $1.75 mark.  Now I have a bet on with E., recorded in the MCR’s wager book, that my 1 Dec. loan installment will arrive at lower than that.  With the pound hovering in the $1.55-$1.59 range for the past few days, I’m will to be optimistic about it… I owe him a pound for every cent difference between $1.70 and whatever it is on 1 Dec.

This also means that the NSF grants I am applying for, specifically the one that I think I have a shot at winning, will be worth a lot more, because they are in dollars.  The one that I think I could get is worth about $15000, which currently translates into:£9360.00.  That’s amazing, since in June it would have been worth about £7500.00.

On the downside, I may not be able to do fieldwork in Iceland this summer since the project I was planning to be a part of was funded by the currently bankrupt Icelandic government.  Hopefully that will get sorted.

My personal spending throughout this past month has not been horrific.  I ate out twice, once for lunch and once for dinner, but always with coupons/special deals so they both cost around £11.00 for two people to eat.  That isn’t so awful, given that I spend on average £2.00-£5.00 per dinner at home (I typically spend under £1.00 on lunch by eating soup and bread in a departmental tea room, so for lunch that is not so good).  I also splurged yesterday and spent about £10.00 on Halloween costume stuff — I’m being a mummy.