Campus Life

I am hemorrhaging money. I have spent more in the past few days than I did all of last month. I went out over Labor Day weekend, bought lunch, a nice professional blazer and a pair of hot-pants like shorts for dancing (both of which were on clearance and cost be a total of $12!!) and a CD. I didn't think much of it since it was all pretty cheap.

But then came the first day of the semester. I decided to get staff parking since I'm working 5 days a week and with more people on campus I lost my "secret" free parking spot. If I were a salaried employee I'd be able to have the cost taken out of my paycheck. Even though I work 40 hrs a week I am technically part-time and hourly so they won't deduct the cost from my pay. Fine, I figured I could pay monthly and just put it on my credit card. Nope. It's by the semester. It's still cheaper than paying by the day, I can also leave and come back if I need to, but still it's $180 when I expected to shell out $45. It ends up being exactly the same as if I paid by the month AND they said that if I cancel they'll re-imburse me for the time I didn't use.

I should have learned my lesson from that experience, but no. I went to the gym to get my staff membership there too. About a month after I stopped being a student and had been a staff they finally withdrew my access. Thank goodness I can sweet talk people because I got 2 weeks of guest passes to get me through until the start of the semester (though thinking on it now, it didn't really save me any $$). So I go to sign up and they tell me they can't take the $10 a week from my paycheck and I'll either have to have a monthly withdrawl from my checking account or pay the whole in full. If I had admitted to being a 12 month contract I'd have had to pay $250, but claiming a 9 month I "only" had to pay $190. At least they didn't want proof. I was hoping to have it taken out of my paycheck so that when I do leave before the 9 months are up I don't have to keep paying for gym access I'm not going to be allowed to use. No such luck.

The good news is that because I got there so early in the semester I was able to sign up for my classes at 1/3 of the price! So in the end I think it's worth it. Not to mention a) if I went elsewhere for gym membership it would be pretty darn close to the same amount, b) if I went elsewhere for my classes they'd easily be $75 for one 6 week class and here I get as many as I want to go to for 4 months. Which means that in the end I got my money's worth.

At the end of the month I also have a computer to pay off - $1200 dollars. The whole Bill Me Later option seemed like a good idea at the time, but now that I have to pay up after having spent more than $300 yesterday, I'm not liking it so much.

On the plus side, I keep thinking of what I'm saving by not moving out on my own. Suddenly living with my mom looks fantastic!