Just a 46-year-old mom of 2 in Northern California. My kids are Monkey Monkey(MM) and Drama Llama (DL). I am married to Monkey Hubby (MH). We did a $80 grocery run when we dropped off MM(19) at college. After the first 30 days, his credit card cycle closed with $70 in grocery costs. Will see how it shakes out during the next few months. But I would be happy to keep it at $200/month or lower. This sounds like it might work out.
CA state funding came through and I have a better idea of real tuition costs this year. First, the state is raising middle class funding over the next few years. I've heard our $2K grant would probably go up to $3K this year. It ended up being $3,400. Woohoo! & might be more next year?
Even better, the CA money is now showing up for all 4 years. Initially he had so many credits they labeled him as a sophomore last year and only was showing 3 years of grants. I am sure that was probably right. Some majors can get out in 2-3 years if you start with a lot of credits. But that's just not going to be the case for his engineering degree. So I don't know what to think, but now it's showing up for all 4 years. So that's +$3K I really was not expecting.
We've whittled the cost of MM(19)'s degree (tuition) down to $14,500.
Edit: MM and his girlfriend are each cooking a meal once a week, and then leftovers are carrying them through. It sounds like girlfriend may be doing even more cooking/baking (she loves to cook) and I think I will try to buy her a grocery gift card for Christmas. She just refuses money (any time we have offered her reimbursements for gas, food, anything). So I am trying to figure out how to put some money back in her pocket.
& I mean, that's just the big food effort. MM(19) loves baked potatoes (cheap/easy) and told us he was buying some frozen meals. If he went straight from home to college/apartment, I would not expect that at all. But I guess he can tolerate some of the frozen meals when the alternative is (terrible/expensive) campus food. It's all relative.
October 18th, 2022 at 03:33 pm 1666107224
October 19th, 2022 at 04:01 pm 1666195275
October 19th, 2022 at 06:38 pm 1666204734
@crazyliblady - It was $150 for the month (with what we bought him to start), but I don't know how much was a little extra with the first grocery run. I can't remember what we bought but for a big bag of rice (that should last a while). Might have been other things like that.
He lives on campus, but he has a kitchen/apartment and is not buying campus food. The campus food was terrible and they really price gouged the freshman (forced to buy meal plans). Which seems to be a vicious cycle where no one else buys the campus food. If you aren't forced, you won't spend 2-3x as much for bad food. He is *very* happy to be able to cook his own meals this year and eat much better food.