Hello, I am in early 20s and will be moving to a Baltimore for PhD this fall from India. I will get a stipend of a little over 3.3k per month for my expenses. I have some questions about how do I plan my finances and some other things. I will first outline my basic expenses. Please let me know if I am underestimating something.
1) I come from a low-income family and have lived all my life quite frugally (by Asian standards) so I have minimal requirements from housing, except good internet. I have found a place ~650USD with utilities which is pretty solid.
2) I don't eat out or smoke or drink. I cook myself and learnt that groceries are ~100-150 pm.
3) Health insurance is given by the University and I don't need to pay for that. Same from gym membership etc.
4) My one unconventional expense is that my SO lives north of the border in Canada and I want to see her ~2 times per semester. So that's about 1000USD per semester but that's about it. So essentially my monthly expenses (averaging the Canada trip) is going to be atleast 1100USD. Add to this phone bills etc so I guess it's safe to assume around 1500USD pm. That leaves me with about 1800USD of free cash per month.
I have the following questions.
1) What kind of credit card should I get. I have never used a credit card before and don't have a credit history. I will open am account with BoA.
2) In India internet is super cheap. We have to pay about 2$ per month for unlimited calls all over country and 1.5GB free internet PER DAY. I saw that in NaM this is quite expensive. Since I will have WiFi both in college and in home I decided to ditch internet on phone completely. So any suggestions on which operator to use will be very nice.
3) MOST IMPORTANT: Am I allowed to invest in financial instruments? I have been investing for quite some time here but don't know if it is legal for me to invest in the US market while I am there on the F1 visa. If yes then what would be a good idea? I won't have much time to follow them in grad school so I thought that a market linked ETF might be a less unsafe choice. I am open to learning more about it so any suggestions on where I can learn more are welcome.
Thank you very much :)
Submitted April 15, 2019 at 07:22AM by roquentin24 http://bit.ly/2Gev5LG
