Reply to How much spending mo why do you allow your freshman college student?

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[quote=Anonymous]I think this post is going to draw a lot of people who didn't have spending money from parents and are well off themselves but want to make sure their kid earns their "fun money" in college (but also don't have to worry about loans etc).

I'll be a slightly different voice. I was a scholarship kid at an expensive, pretty tough to get into university. 1st in family to go to college, 2nd gen American. This was early 00s so it might be a bit skewed with specific numbers but I left college with 24 K in loans, parents paid about 24K total (divorced) and the rest I earned in scholarships. Worked summers 50 hrs a week but didn't work during school year except intermittently because I tanked 2 early semesters and needed to basically get all As to bring it back up the last 5 semesters. So I lived on a pretty tight budget for clothes, some of my books, gas for borrowed summer car, computer (I was in a greek organization- a dorky one!- but dues were really cheap). I had an emergency CC but never bough anything on it except a sweatshirt and 2 dinners (asked first) in 4 years.

But my parents were in service industry jobs and worked their ass off to save for my school and my siblings (since they got less academic merit $) and it was just a sort of a sense of pride for them to be able to put an extra $200-250 bucks in my hand in August and at Xmas break so that I could "have fun", not to keep up with the Joneses obviously, but to let myself feel like I could also have some of the college experience more than I could afford on my own. It was nice. I spent all of it :) Mostly on beer and pizza and bagels and the occasional sale tank top from the mall. I'd already learned to save and what not with my own jobs very early on, etc

I got lucky in that my friend group included a huge range of people who were on full rides and had nothing at home to people who had anything they wanted and parents cut a $40K check every year to the school for them but weren't really into being flashy or so influenza'd that they didn't understand other SES situations. My DH came from humble beginnings too and while his friends were great guys, they were all clueless rich kids with unlimited budgets- that made things more stressful for him.

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