Plan on a lot of over-spray, but will still look better than bare metal (at least for a year or 2)

Q9: No rebuild option?

While out of town my engine needed a new head gasket (a known problem with that model Subaru)

Had it done at the local dealer – $2000, which also included a loaner and replacing all belts/hoses/seals/water pump/radiator.

Already have 20,000 on my ‘new’ engine, still runs great, for far cheaper than any car payment.

Your mom paid your car insurance, paid your health insurance and gave you $1000. Thats worth far more than the amount you lost by not being able to claim yourself.

I think its safe to assume your mom had higher income and higher tax rate than you so if she claimed the deduction it would be worth more than if you claimed it. If you were in the 15% bracket (like most college students) then a single exemption of $3700 is only going to change the tax bill by about $555. Your health insurance probably cost more than that.

Whatever is left over I get to spend, so I divide it roughly into 4 equal chunks (for each week in the month, give or take) and I use that as a guide for how much to spend every week.

I’d love it if Trent would talk about writing his novel some more.

No matter what schedule you get paid on, budgeting is the same. You’ve got to prioritize the bills, pay the ones due now, and save up for the bills that need multiple paychecks to cover. It may require some self-discipline to not spend that money, but it can be done.

To me, getting paid monthly felt like a windfall. All month there’s no money, no money, no money, then…MONEY! I’d feel flush with cash and want to splurge on groceries, household items, and other things I’d denied myself all month. But I would remember how long it would be until my next paycheck and that convinced me to have some restraint. I was earning very little at the time and there wasn’t a lot left over after paying my regular bills, which made waiting for that next monthly paycheck feel even longer.

It might be helpful to you to list all the paydays for the upcoming year, so you can figure which months you need to be most careful to be sure your bills are covered by the cash on hand. One disadvantage to the employee when getting paychecks every two weeks is that your actual monthly pay is less than what it would seem based on your annual pay (1/13th instead of 1/12th). And I never seemed to get much benefit from those two “extra” paychecks as they seemed to hit just as rent & other major bills came due.

My 2nd step was to list all my required expenses (meaning, simply, bills I had to pay, like car payment, insurance, rent, utilities) & total them. Then I knew how much remained in the budget for food and other variable expenses, and how much of each check needed to go toward them. Any payments with a hard due date (rent, for example) are prioritized. I worked with a couple of the places where I made monthly payments to shift the due date later in the month.

I also tracked this on a very simple worksheet for about a year until I got the hang of how the cash flow worked out.

#8 Goldsmith’s calculation works on paper but not in real life, as I know of no landlord or lender that will accept 46% of a payment every other week.

Also, I ended up staying an Ohio resident throughout my undergraduate and Ohio is one of those wonderful states that also has city income tax. So I also owed a city that I didn’t actually live in. I didn’t even realize that most states don’t have city income tax.

My parents claimed me as a dependent all through college, never gave me a time, and pocketed all the educational tax credits. It was something that just wasn’t worth fighting them on because I earned so little as a college student that I got all my federal taxes back anyway. It was kind of jerky of them, but I wouldn’t have benefited if they stopped. You probably wouldn’t either.

I’d suggest to take a look at the faculty around and check what they are wearing. If the majority of them can get around with random tshirts, so can you.