<p>Daughter will spend fall semester abroad. She just called and said that at a meeting for the trip she was told that she she should budget $5k or so for "spending money". How much did you send (or spend) for your child spending a term in Europe?</p>
<p>That’s crazy, unless the students are responsible for arranging their own housing for the semester abroad and the $5000 is meant to include that. </p>
<p>Where’s she studying? Monaco?</p>
<p>Nope - France, and she will be staying with a host family. I think the spending money amount is meant to allow for travel around Europe while there. Still, it seems excessive to say the least. What I am looking for are real numbers - how much is actually reasonable to allow the child to have a nice experience while in Europe.</p>
<p>Many students (and many schools?) treat the semester abroad as a 5 month long “vacation opportunity”. If “traveling around Europe” is part of the plan, I am sure you can spend $5000 and more.
Family stay normally includes 2 meals a day on weekdays, and breakfast on weekends. So your child will probably need extra money for food. A reasonable amount is easy to calculate.</p>
<p>The Euro is looking better than in a long time. $5K is outrageous, my kids traveled on the cheap throughout Europe, making $1.5K go a long way when a Euro was almost $1.50. You can eat really cheaply in France if you like croissants and baguettes!</p>
<p>$5000 is not outrageous at all. DS just got back from a semester in Europe, and he spent close to that much. He was in a dorm with 21 meals per week. How did he run up that much money? He traveled virtually every weekend. He stayed in hostels and flew low-to-mid-cost airlines (the lowest cost airlines leave from more remote airports, he discovered that by the time he paid for a bus or cab to get to the remote airport he’d eaten up much of the airfare savings and taken several valuable hours out of his weekend.) He was staying in Barcelona, which has limited train access, so he had to fly. He took weekend trips to Bilbao, Grenada, Switzerland, Amsterdam, Prague, London, Munich, Valencia, and a weeklong Spring Break trip to Rome, Corfu and Athens. </p>
<p>We are fairly budget-conscious people, and S is not high-maintenance nor is he into the club scene. He stayed in hostels. But when traveling he did eat the local cuisine, took tours (walking or bicycle), paid entry fees to museums, castles, etc. He also paid about $70 to attend a soccer game - FC Barca vs Seville, an experience that he loved and that showed him an important aspect of Spanish culture. And we encouraged him to do it all. This was pretty much a once-in-a-lifetime experience, and we wanted him to get as much out of it as possible. It was easier and cheaper to travel while he was there than to try to get back to Europe later from the USA.</p>
<p>He says if he had stayed somewhere more central in Europe (ie Germany) with a good train system it might have been cheaper. But $5000 is not unreasonable at all, if my budget-conscious son spent that much. It was his own money, with a limited bonus amount from us, so he was watching his spending closely. Europe is expensive (although the Euro is dropping as we speak).</p>
<p>We didn’t consider the semester a 4-month “vacation opportunity.” But we didn’t send him to Barcelona for a semester so he could sit in a library and study. The whole point of going was to get out, travel, go places and see things. Even a subway ride in Barcelona was 2 Euro (about 3 dollars) </p>
<p>He posted his pictures on Shutterfly - he ended up with about 1500 amazing pictures from all over Europe.</p>
<p>Do parents routinely subsidize these sort of perks (extensive travel) for college age students? </p>
<p>My kid has spent all sorts of time living and traveling abroad, but outside of the regular fees for the semester abroad, which were paid via her home campus… all the “extra” travel and expenses have been on her own time. Now that I think about it she did take a lot of side trips that probably cost a lot-- but it wasn’t my money, so I didn’t ask. </p>
<p>Anyway … my advice to carmen617 would be to tell her daughter, “that’s nice. I was planning to give you $1500* – I hope knowing that will help with your planning.” If the study abroad is in the fall, the student has some time over the summer to try to earn extra to make up whatever she she thinks she needs for the difference. (* = whatever the parent thinks is reasonable or fair, or is within the parental budget). Paying for my kid’s college has been tough enough – I didn’t think I should be on the hook for the kid’s vacation. I did pick up the full tab for the one week I flew out to vacation with my kid – if I get to come along, then it puts me in a far more generous mood.</p>
<p>Hahahahaha!!! If I HAD $5000 to give her for spending money, I wouldn’t.</p>
<p>D spent a semester abroad. She had money saved from her summer job - I honestly couldn’t tell you how much, as it was money she earned. I gave her $125 a week for food. She spent less & used the rest for fun money. She returned with money. She opted to visit only places she could afford … cheapest flights, hostels, eating where the locals ate … didn’t go to London but went to other cool places, including Rome.</p>
<p>If you have a bunch of money to give her, go for it. The point is, you don’t “have” to give her a lot. Give her what you feel you can afford & let her figure out how to spend it. She may not get to do everything she wants … that’s a great life lesson.</p>
<p>We did not give our daughter any spending money for her study abroad program. She used her savings from summer jobs over the years to pay for stuff like hang gliding in the Andes, vacationing in grass huts on a cliff overlooking the Indian Ocean in India, sightseeing in Beijing, and so forth. She never asked for any spending money. I think she felt like covering the cost of the program was a fair contribution to the endeavor.</p>
<p>I think she ended up spending quite a bit of money, but I really don’t know how much.</p>
<p>I didn’t give him $5000. We gave him $1000, it was a combination Christmas and 21st birthday present. The rest of the money he spent was his - his savings since childhood, and from his summer job. That’s how I know he didn’t run around wasting money or drinking it away in clubs - it was HIS money and he’s pretty frugal. </p>
<p>If your kid goes to Europe for 4 months and plans to travel every weekend, it wouldn’t be hard to spend close to $5000 (in fact, it will take some economizing to keep it below that number). If they go to Europe and only travel a couple of times it will of course be cheaper.</p>
<p>And as I said, we didn’t characterize all this travel as “vacation” or “perks.” It was an integral part of the educational experience. If you want your kid to go to France and stay in one place in France for a semester, fine. We wanted him to explore Europe. In our opinion learning about different cultures, traveling on his own (or with friends), finding his way around, booking flights and hostels, budgeting his time and his money, were educational experiences far more valuable than what he learned in his classes there. He can learn in a classroom in the USA. That’s not why he went to Europe.</p>
<p>I spent three and a half months in the Netherlands in spring 2007, back when the exchange rate was at its worst (I think it was like $1.60 to a euro). I was in an undergraduate fellowship program, so I was getting a $913/month stipend, which ended up being a bit under $600 euro a month. That was more than enough for just in-country living - even taking into account clubbing and other fun activities, and I did travel a little. I lived with a host family that provided two meals during each week day and I think breakfast on the weekends, although in practice I ate with them at dinner sometimes on the weekends as well. I also never took public transit in Amsterdam, because my school fees included a bicycle rental and Amsterdam is a biking city.</p>
<p>As for calmom’s question…well, my mom gave me a little bit of money to get me started, but because my fellowship was paying me per month she didn’t give me much more than that. But I’d say I was easily one of the lower-income students on the program - it was an expensive program and my large scholarship was covering the vast majority of it. All of the other kids on my program were receiving monies from their parents, which is why they traveled more extensively than I did (a lot of them stayed 2-4 weeks after the semester was over to travel around Europe, which I could not do because I didn’t have the money AND I had to go back home and work). One of my very few regrets about the study abroad program was not getting the chance to explore Europe more fully when I was over there, particularly because I don’t know when I’ll get the chance to go back. The Netherlands has an extensive train system, but I was really focused on my studies and exploring Amsterdam and the Netherlands itself. I traveled to Germany and Spain halfway through the program, and Belgium at some point, and it was amazing, and I wish I had gotten the chance to go to some more places. If I could do it all over again I would’ve taken out a Stafford loan - even knowing about loan debt, since I’m 2 years out of college - to do more extensive traveling in Europe, that’s how seriously important I think it is to get out of your host country and explore. It contributes to the learning experience SO MUCH.</p>
<p>We’ve taken our kids to explore Europe on sizable budgets many times. Part of the beauty of study abroad was their learning to see Europe on a budget. What we saw is that they traveled to the budget of the kids with the least funds. It was a great exercise.</p>
<p>While I think there is some value to traveling on the weekends, I also think that there is value in actually getting to know the town you are in better. For example the year my brother was in Tour he joined the local chorus. My family in Tours had a cottage in the countryside and I spent weekends there helping them pick grapes, gather nuts and other farm type activities. I also got to know other French young people in Tours and did things with them. I wouldn’t have gotten to know the French as well as I did if I’d spent every weekend going to see a different country in Europe. I did go to Brittany on spring break and to Paris for a long weekend, and at the end of my stay I visited a friend in Switzerland. (I think I also felt less pressure to squeeze all of Europe into one trip as I had traveled quite a bit with my parents growing up in the Foreign Service.)</p>
<p>Same with my DD who spent a term in Normandy. She went with the family weekends to visit the grandparents, spent time with them in their Paris flat and even went on a family vacation to Portugal. Other weekends she hung out with her host sister’s college friends. She became 100% fluent.</p>
<p>S spent the fall in Paris. He was at a homestay. I have no idea how much money he spent, but we did not give him any. He took one weekend trip to Switzerland, by train, and his group went on several weekend excursions to destinations such as chateaux. He is very frugal. I am quite sure that he didn’t spend anything approaching $5K–probably more like $1K. He bought a lot of baguettes and cheese for lunch, and had a few good restaurant meals. He bought perhaps 3 items of clothing. He didn’t feel deprived, had a great time. On the other hand, Paris has a lot more to offer than some provincial cities. If you wanted to do significant traveling, it would be easy to rack up $5K.</p>
<p>Thanks for all the feedback and answers. We are not going to give her five grand, as a matter of fact we hadn’t planned to give her anything at all - she’s accustomed to working in the summer to save up her spending and book money for the school year and that was meant to be her spending money on this trip. Our original thought was that she would spend her summer earnings on this trip as frugally as possible, and we would supplement the shortfall later in the school year. However, since she can only reasonably expect to bank about $2000 or so each summer, it’s clear we will have to step in sooner than we hoped.</p>
<p>She’s a frugal kid, and has some relatives in other parts of Europe she can plan excursions around, but she will be spending her term in a town about 2 hours from Paris and we certainly want her to travel while she’s there. She wants us to come and visit while she is abroad - I truly don’t know how parents find the money to do that with more than one in school.</p>
<p>carmen, we went to visit S when he was in Spain and it was an amazing experience. He had been there about 6 weeks when we arrived, and I think he really enjoyed playing tourguide, showing us around “his” city. He had done several walking tours thru his program, and he took us to many of those sites and shared his knowledge with us. He told us what the local food specialties were, led us around on the subway… it was so neat, having him be our leader/teacher for probably the first time. It was expensive, but at least we didn’t have to pay his airfare since he was already there. We only stayed 5 days and we stayed in the same city the whole time. If there is any way that it is possible for you to visit your daughter in France, please try to do it. It’s an experience you just can’t replicate anywhere else. And for the rest of his semester, and now since he’s been home, when he talks about places and experiences he had in his city, we know what he’s talking about!</p>
<p>Just because a kid is abroad doesn’t mean he/she needs to travel all over as if he/she would never go back there again. I am sure some time in their life time they’ll go back there again, especially once they start to make some good money on their own. </p>
<p>D1 studied in Sydney. We paid for half of her trips. She went to Fiji and Melburn. She got to know Sydney very well and made many good friends while she was there. I am sure she will go back there again and maybe next time she’ll make it to New Zealand. Her life is long.</p>
<p>Son heads to New Zealand next semester. His school suggested he bring 5K, his student advisor said she spent 4K when she was there. I told him that since I was paying for his tuition and R&B he was responsible for his activities and trips.</p>
<p>IMO, for spending 4 months in Europe- France in particular- $5,000 isn’t much at all. Even for the most frugal for people. </p>
<p>Europe IS expensive, and France is ridiculously more so than other countries, followed closely by Italy.</p>