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Budgeting Your Income
(or lack thereof)
You're tossing up your mortarboard in celebration. It's graduation time, baby! Congratulations! Now go scrounge up those #2 pencils and that calculator you thought you'd never need again. When you're through posing for the camera with that fancy-pants new degree of yours, it's time for the toughest homework assignments to date - creating and managing your personal budget!
When I graduated college, I continued to work at my part-time radio job to stockpile some start-up dough. About a month later, I moved to a new city with a friend. We were clueless, and worse yet, jobless. That whole summer, we subsisted on little more than a bulk package of generic brand Popsicles. At the time, it was agonizing trying to figure out how we would make ends meet. Of course, hindsight reveals the silver lining. Those few months provided an ideal time for learning the true value of money.
Designing a budget that works for you is more involved than you might think. It means you'll need to develop a thorough understanding of the bacon you're makin' and how much of it you actually bring home. The salary your company quotes you is significantly lessened after taxes, social security, and Medicare are deducted - not to mention elective withdrawals for medical coverage or a 401(k). (We'll talk about such benefits another time.) Budgeting also requires a complete knowledge of all your financial obligations. Take a moment to write down the amounts you'll spend on your monthly rent, student loans, car payment, insurance, utility bills, cell phone and Internet charges, gas, food, entertainment, and any other monies you owe.
In a perfect world, your expenses could easily be covered by the money you rake in at work. Unfortunately, in the "real world," that's not always the case. Because of this disparity, it may be necessary to cut corners where you can. Here are a couple sites I've come across to help you do just that:
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Craigslist.org is a huge network of classifieds and forums - a place to find jobs, housing, goods & services, social activities, advice, community information, and just about anything else. Just click on the major city nearest you to open a wealth of opportunity - all for free! |
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Hatch Magazine "helps navigate the choppy waters of post-college life." This link will take you to the e-zine's popular money page. |
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Digs Magazine touts itself as "a home and living guide for the post-college, pre-parenthood, quasi-adult generation." Sounds accurate enough. Read through thousands of articles geared toward helping you live richly while still on the cheap. |
Probably the biggest lesson you'll learn while designing (and redesigning) your budget is this: The best things in life truly are free, or nearly so. Though it certainly didn't seem so at the time, those "poor" days spent gobbling Popsicles are among the richest of my post-college life thus far... spent alongside my apartment complex's pool reading piles of borrowed library books. Sign me up for that again! It beats a 9-to-5 any day. You'll see. |
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