<p>To all the people calling me a ■■■■■, I just got my braces on a few weeks ago, so yes I will still have them for my first year of college. My parents are more than willing to supply me with $1000 a month plus $500 in airfare to fly home for visits and ortho appointments. It’s understood that the $1000 will be contingent on me having a 3.5 or above. As for the OP, you should get a job related to the field you’d like to enter or no job at all if your grandfather is okay with that. </p>
<p>Is that $1000 a month just for incidentals? That’s generous but not completely unreasonable if it’s for books and food and rent and utilities, etc. But even fashion-loving D would probably have to work fairly hard to spend $250 a week if her basic living expenses were already taken care of. (Even if she treats herself to aveda instead of grocery-store brand hair products.)</p>
<p>NIck, your parents must be very wealthy if they are willing to pay $500 a month for airfare rather than simply arrange for you to visit a local orthodontist. My daughter lived abroad for 5 months when she was a teenager in braces, and the orthodontist felt it was fine for her to go without a checkup for that entire time, even though normally she would have a once-monthly visit. And $1000/month for incidentals is far more than any college student could possibly need, unless you are living off campus and paying your rent out of that. </p>
<p>I see from your other posts that you are a high school junior looking to apply to schools like U of Wisconsin. Somehow I find it odd that your parents would have discussed a monthly allowance with you so far in advance of the time you are going to college – I am thinking that perhaps your post is more wishful thinking than reality, right along with your dreams of becoming a “wall street investment banker.” </p>
<p>Enjoy your dreams – but please don’t post them as fact on a thread in the parents’ forum. We’re older and a whole lot wiser than you are. We may not all agree on the appropriate amount to provide a college student, but we can know the difference between an adolescent fantasy and real-world financial management. </p>
<p>Wow. Big numbers floating around here! I was thinking $100/month. He’ll have a meal plan and I’ll pay for visits home separately. We’ll send him with clothes and dorm stuff. Why would he need more?</p>
<p>My daughter gets $85/month allowance. If she wants more takeout it’s on her dime. Yes some of these numbers are nuts.</p>
<p>Perhaps some of the big spenders here can enumerate what it is that they are spending these funds on? Aside, of course, from plane tix home to visit the orthodontist.</p>
<p>I think the takeaway here is that a monthly allowance should not be, “whatever a kid still in high school thinks he wants”. (“Nickxx” is still a high school junior.) The OP - StMarys14 – comes off as having an attitude of entitlement, but in all fairness only asked what a “reasonable” allowance might be. </p>
<p>@OLDFORT; That’s easy, I will refer her to office of on-campus students work study, so she can get a part-time job to buy her own sushi. However if grades goes down, then next semester, she will have to stop eating sushi, an go back to pizza till she can balance funding a sushi eating habit and making excellent grades.</p>
<p>:(|) </p>
<p>cco2018 - my kid does have a job campus, stipulation on getting an allowance from me. Both she and her sister got a job the first week they were on campus. My kids go out to dinner with friends on weekends. They buy presents for close friends and family members. They also buy few things online. I have tracked their spendings over the years, and they seem to spend around 300 a month.</p>
<p>S will not get an allowance next year. He will have an unlimited meal plan, we will pay for books, continue to pay his cell phone, and get him home one way or another(during breaks only). We will also stock him with toiletries before he leaves and during breaks. What else could he possibly “need?” Am I missing anything? I think college is a good time to distinguish between “wants” and “needs.” He has savings from work, prizes, gifts, ect. and if he finds that his “need” for $5 Starbucks’ coffee starts to out pace his savings he will “need” to find a campus job. Forget 10 hours, working even less than that should provide adequate spending money each week. I can’t believe that there is any kid that can’t find 5-6 hours a week that they are wasting.</p>
<p>@oldfort; In that case there should be no worries there. As long as good grades are in the picture, then they will be just fine.
@planner03; That seems just right, and with all that, he can actually manage with on campus job income and really does not need allowance from you, except you really want to.</p>
<pre><code> Some students spending habits are influenced by PEER PRESSURE. There are always over-funded kids in colleges, and many are not shy about flaunting their resources. So, students really do need to hear that “NO” from their parents sometimes, in order to be more responsible with their finances and “OWN THINKING”.,
</code></pre>
<p>I do know parent’s that gave their daughter $1,500 a month in allowance, in addition to covering all expenses including car and phone. Unfortunately, she didn’t spend much of her time sober as there were a lot of people willing to help her find ways to have fun with the money. She came home to have her baby and is at community college where she works part time. The money made things much worse.</p>
<p>I know of another instance of parents that gave their son a similar allowance. He ended up with a DUI and rather than tell his parents he used the money to fund his own attorney so they wouldn’t find out. It was fine until a few years latter it impacted grad school and his career prospects. If he had communicated with his parents it may not have impacted his life the same way.</p>
<p>There is another instance where a kid was on academic probation due to partying (the easiest way to spend the money on friends) and he ended up getting on academic probation resulting in a academic probation learning class being required. He bragged about how he hired people to write his papers for the academic probation class. He ended up back at a community college. </p>
<p>College is too comfortable, these days. For the most part, kids have all of their needs met with housing, a meal plan, and medical insurance. They don’t NEED money. If you think back to your own college days, I am sure you recall some of the best times being when you were broke and hanging out with friends. </p>
<p>A lot of kids have no problem having the whole college experience, including road trips, concerts, and meals out for just a few hundred dollars a month. Don’t bail your kids out if they run out of money, let them learn to budget now because it will make matters worse if they don’t know how to budget by the time they graduate.</p>
<p>Do answer the question: I would say a budget of $20-$50 a week is more than generous. </p>
<p>Also, to the parents that say their kids don’t work but cite clubs, sports, or other commitments: those can be just as valuable if they are committed to them. </p>
<p>I know my kids’ spend is not influenced by peer pressure. They like certain food because of us. I don’t like fast food, so when I do go out to eat I eat at sit down restaurants, or I preferred to eat at home. Same with my kids. They will go to restaurants to eat rather than order food in. They also have friends who fly all over the world and have a lot nicer things than they do, but they don’t ask us to indulge them on those things because we didn’t live like that.</p>
<p>I don’t know if the OP is for real, but just in case: I had the same question about my daughter’s spending money when she went off to college last August. Before she left, she set up a student checking account, deposited her earnings for the summer in it, then gave us online access to monitor and help her out if she was running low or if she had a large expense (piano lessons and choir tour). When she knew she had a big check due for one of these things, we’d transfer money from our account to hers.</p>
<p>The only expenses she had were books, the occasional meal out, subway fare, and stuff like laundry soap and shampoo. She spent a lot less than we thought she would.</p>
<p>@planner03 - "What else could he possibly “need?” He will need some money for laundry, printing fees or other stuff for class projects depending on his major. While these things don’t cost a lot of money they do come up during the school year. For example DS was told this week he needs to buy a classroom kit for his engineering class so while it’s only $20. It’s still “needed”. I’m not sure how much DS spends on laundry and that kind of stuff for a semester but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was $100 or so. </p>
<p>@oldfort “I know my kids’ spend is not influenced by peer pressure”
That may very well be particularly if their friends are of a similar SEC and have similar spending patterns. Maybe “peer pressure” isn’t the correct term, but I understand what @ccco2018 is saying. If your friends are going out and eating in restaurants every weekend, it is hard to stay behind night after night.</p>
<p>@MichaganGeorgia I guess it depends on the situation. If a kid has NO money of their own then every little thing will need to be considered. Since S does have some money, I don’t think it is big deal to expect him to spend a few dollars a week on laundry, ect. I’ve got a feeling Ms. OP has some money of her own…</p>
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<p>@nickxx </p>
<p>this seems like such a crazy plan unless your flights will be short-term puddle-jumpers.</p>
<p>and unless your ortho has saturday appts, the logistics of flying home for a Friday appt would probably mean having a schedule with no Friday classes, which is hard for a frosh to do.</p>
<p>Flying anywhere of some distance for “just a weekend” has become very difficult these days and can mean spending most of the weekend traveling to and from airports, going thru the security process both ways, waiting, experiencing delays/cancelled flights, and then the actual flying time back and forth. and if a time-change is also involved, that is also an issue.</p>
<p>Your family may not have thought all of this thru…the logistics would be a nightmare, and some of those weekends may involve missing popular campus activities that your friends are all attending.</p>
<p>Maybe Nick should go to University of Wisconsin…and have his family give him a Lexus, or a Mercedes. He could drive home.</p>
<p>My son didn’t work the summer after his senior year either. We figured he needed a break, and honestly boys don’t get much of a break ever again in life, so I didn’t have a problem with him taking some time off. We gave him an allowance of $20/week, and he did have some savings from birthday and graduation presents going back several years. He is just finishing his freshman year and has a full time, paid internship for this summer. So I think somewhere between $80-$100/month allowance should by and large work for your first year. You might not feel rich on that amount, but you should be able to function pretty well. We did pay for school related expenses though such as textbooks, club sports fees, etc. </p>