How much to budget for additional expenses?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Our DC is the first one to go to college in our family. What is a good estimate of how much money we should budget for beyond tuition, room, board and books? Thinking $400-600 for phone, incidentals and meals outside of meal plan. Anything else? Location is suburban with a medium cost of living. Thanks!

That’s plenty.

And, if your child seems to be well-prepared for the school, and is going in with good stats and a good work ethic, it might be reasonable to expect your DC to earn a lot of that from a work-study job after the first month or two. If the school is good about providing jobs, consider writing a $1,000 starter check at the beginning of the year, and then see if your DC can come up with rest of the spending money for the year.

If that’s not practical, because your kid is a premed, is going to a very tough school, etc., and you can afford to provide the spending money, go for it, but a lot of kids (including rich people’s kids) enjoy earning their own spending money and learning to budget. So, don’t feel as if you have to lavish spending money on your kid to be a good parent.