As we prepare to send our daughter off to college next year I’m curios as to how you handle the ‘pocket cash’ for your kid? And what kind of budget is realistic for a kid on campus with a meal plan? I know there are many ‘schools of thought’ but wanted to get some perspectives from this group.
Started out -I pay for tuition, room and board and books. Kids pay for other incidentals with the money from their summer jobs. Somehow over the years its expanded to me also paying their Uber w my cc, and them having access to my amazon prime acct (w my cc) for ordering drugstore/ food type supplies or the occasional for fun reading material.
We handled it with “get a job” (summer + during the school year). This was not much of shock to either kid, as we began easing them off the payroll in HS.
I did laugh when our youngest said, “Wow. Tampons are EXPENSIVE.” Welcome to adulthood, dear.
We have our credit card linked to the Uber and Lyft apps on their phones. Our thinking was, don’t decide to walk, or get into a car with an impaired driver because you’re a college kid and too cheap to pay for an Uber. The kids don’t abuse it, and we are happy to pay for that.
We don’t have a lot of disposable income, so in a way, it’s not so hard for us to “cut the kids off” once they start working and expecting them to pony up. I’m not sure what I’d do if we had more money to throw around.
We pay for necessities: groceries, shampoo, toothpaste, laundry, etc.
We also pay for the cellphone.
We pay for textbooks, and get a tax credit for that.
If they want to go out to dinner with friends, concerts and such, they use their spending money earned with their summer and campus job.
Love the UBER idea. Hadn’t thought about it from that perspective but makes total sense!
My kids have money saved from birthdays, babysitting, grad gifts, etc they can use freshman year, sophomore year they are expected to get a part time job if they need more money. They do have a credit card on our account for “approved purchases” and emergency. We give them each a credit card when they start driving and they’ve never abused it.
Same as above. We pay tuition, room, board, books, cell phone. Kid funds walking around money out of own birthday/job money, which is funded periodically to a debit card.
Put like $250 in there at start of first semester and see how it goes, how long it lasts, and how responsible the kid is with spending. Make sure you can monitor the account online. My kids budgets definitely varied between different college situations. A big variation is how their meal plan works and how much your kid (and their friends) do or don’t use the meal plan.
For emergencies, the kid has a credit card where the bills come to us but is prohibited from using it without our permission. Except for Lyft/Uber which is linked to that CC.
Yes, our kids each have a credit card too, same reason as @3scoutsmom , approved purchases and emergency.
We made sure it was with a company where each user has a separate account, so if one card is lost/stolen/gets a fraud alert, only that one card is locked, not all of them. Learned this the hard way.
Son pays for his personal expenses (including his books) with money earned from summer and/or school job. If push came to shove, and he couldn’t afford needed books, we would probably help him out there. He has my old car with him, for which he pays for gas, but I pay for registration, insurance, maintenance and repairs. We of course are also paying for his tuition, room and board, fees, and health care…
Like others we pay tuition, room, board, and books. Oldest DD is taking this semester off, so she is paying all her expenses for the semester (rent, food, transportation, entertainment etc.). We’ve never given her a credit card, other that the one linked to our HSA, which is for medical expenses only. She has a debit card that she can use as a credit card. It’s for her account, that way she can’t spend more than what’s in her account. If there’s something that we would agree to pay for, I can transfer the money to her account and then she can use her debit card. We did give her internet service for the year as a birthday gift, so right now we are paying that bill, but if she wants us to continue, she’ll have to choose that as her birthday gift again.
I pay for tuition, room and board, airfare to/from school, and will provide free food and housing in the summer if she is not busy elsewhere. Everything else is on her. Of course, if she gets in a bind, I would help.
Her money comes from a stipend included in her scholarship, savings from summer jobs, etc. We also have an agreement that if she gets departmental or special scholarships beyond her “big” scholarship, it ends up in her pocket. For example, she has a departmental scholarship that is applied to tuition/fees, but I give her an equivalent amount of cash since the tuition/fees expense went down from the original budget.
I paid tuition, room & board, fees, cell phone (not overages, though), and transportation home. Occasionally something else when asked in advance by the kid (like a zip car to drive to take subject test GREs for grad school admissions).
Kids covered all spending money and books themselves. They are MUCH more frugal when purchasing or renting books when they are paying! We also required them to cover expenses if they took a summer internship or research position where they weren’t living at home. I did pitch in some for their groceries when they spent summers not at home because I’d have been paying for those if they were home anyway.
Both my kids went into college with some money because they’d saved xmas/birthday gifts from grandparents and got some money for graduation gifts. I also insisted that both work for money the summer before college, just to get some initial experience working for money for someone who wasn’t their parent. One landed a paid internship teaching inner city kids, and the other night stocked at Walmart that summer.
One worked part time during school for sophomore thru senior year in the school writing center. The other was too strapped academically to work during the school year, but made a couple thousand over summers even after paying room & board for research positions on campus.
I think college is a good time to start having kids take some ownership of their finances, and for us this was a pretty good balancing act to give them those responsibilities. Both were also expected to graduate in 4 years and somehow be self supporting when they were done. I let them come home the summer after college if they were starting something in the fall (job for one, grad school for the other). But the expectation was set when they left for college that the bank of mom was good for 8 semesters and no more. Of course if they’d gotten ill or something I’d probably have adapted that, but I didn’t tell them that… 
We give my daughter $200 a month for incidentals and pay for Uber for the same reason as @midwest67. However, I think next year (her junior year) we will tell her she needs to save money from her summer job to use for spending money because she is certainly not learning to budget with our giving her money.
Both my college girls work over the summer and bank that money for their own spending. One DD has a work study job that gives her extra at school. The other is an RA. That gives us a big break on room and board so we supplement her if needed. They like to have their own money to spend without having to justify it to us. We pay for books, tuition, room, board and will take them to the grocery store when we’re visiting.
Her on campus/summer jobs cover those in our family. Much like in high school.
Thanks for the responses with some really solid ideas…
We pay the balance of tuition, room, board, fees, plane tickets for breaks, and bought the football season tickets.
Most colleges have cash equivalent tied to the student ID, good only on campus and at the bookstore. We put $500 on our son’s student account for books (he managed to stay under by getting used) and opened a local checking account for him with $50 in it. The rest is up to him. Currently he is scrubbing dishes for $9/hour in the dining hall. So far, he has paid for a haircut and $27 for snacks.
Before he graduated High School – but after he had turned 18 – we helped our son obtain his own checking account with a debit card from our local bank. He previously had a savings account there. He does all his banking through their mobile app on his phone, so it doesn’t really matter whether there is a branch near his college (there does happen to be one in the town).
He was doing a study abroad program in France for his first semester in college, and it was recommended that he needed a credit card (not just a debit card), so he reluctantly signed up for his own credit card through the student program offered by our bank (he didn’t really want a credit card, he’s freaked out by the idea of debt). I think the student card has a $500 credit limit; in any case the card is in his own name, so he is building his own credit history.
We cover tuition (though kid’s merit award covers part of that), room and board, and deposit monthly into his checking account about $75 month for incidentals, which includes pizza, dinner out to the local greasy spoon with girl friend, etc. We did add kid to an unused credit card account of ours for emergencies – if the wallet gets lost (several close calls, but always found) it doesn’t impact us if we have to cancel the card. That was a CC parent tip, thank you! We also got Apple Care for his new phone he went off to college – has already paid for itself.
I pay tuition, room, board, books and supplies, including such items as razors, dental floss and the like, as well as transportation. He had some money saved up and is using that for incidentals. He is pretty frugal and has only been off campus three times, twice to Denny’s and once to Walmart. I mailed him a care package of tea bags, hot chocolate and oatmeal so he can have something in his room.
I got him a joint credit card with me with a $500 limit. I pay expenses that I agree to cover, e.g., tickets home, tickets for shows at school. He pays from his savings any other expenses. So far, he hasn’t had another expense. I told him I would give him spending money if he needed because I didn’t want him working the first semester, but he may try to get one next semester.
Whether he gets a job over the summer is dependent on whether or not he opts for summer school. I would like him to take his required math class over the summer because as long as he gets a C, the credit transfers but the GPA isn’t impacted. If he is in summer school, I won’t ask him to work because I want him to study.
To the OP, I would immediately cancel the credit card and use his savings to pay if off. As for staying in school. how are his grades? Is he attending classes or cutting out to go to Portland?
This could be a good learning experience for him. Maybe he should take a class in financial planning?