Happy Thursday everyone, I'm 20 y/o currently pursuing a Mechanical Engineering degree. Going into 3rd year @ uni and I'm truly unsure of what to do with my money going into the future. I have no credit card debt, currently have credit score a little over 750, and live in an apartment at school. I have a few qualms with some future expenses that I may fall into, so I'm looking for advice on how to approach the final 2 years at school. I pull approx. $1.5k per month from full-time work (current internship) after taxes, but this job is ending soon. I plan on going back to my old job where I make $200-300 a week (no taxes), but that'll only be during August. From Sept. to May. I'll have a part-time where I'll be making a lil over $1000 a month on top of school. Now, I have around $6.5k in a very low interest checking account (0.125% annually), and 2 credit lines that I use for various cashback rewards / frequent flyer miles.
I'm blessed with having my tuition & room/board paid for the past 2 years, and I'm covered at least for 1 more. My main worry is that going into 4th year, I'll have to take out student loans totaling around $18k (when all is said and done). In anticipation, I've started browsing r/personalfinance and have attempted to gain some insight into budgeting and made a preliminary budget for each month:
Rent: $615 Electricity/Water: $50 Cable/Internet: $15 Food: $120 Individual Expenses (Gas, gifts, drinks): $100 Savings: $100+
Totaling: $1000+/month in planned expenditures.
Looking for answers to a few questions:
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Does this preliminary budget seem accurate? I recently started using YNAB (free to students after 34 days if you flash them the student ID) and I manually put in expenses, but just started July 1st.
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Recommendations for preparing to take out loans? Want to get the best possible deals, idk if Federal unsubsidized, or private loans should be the route taken.
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Should I be investing my extraneous money into a savings account? I've read about Vanguard's Roth IRA investment account, and was wondering if I should dump $5.5k in there and leave it alone, OR if I should leave everything in the checking account to keep open and available for the next couple of years.
Lastly, I'm sitting with rather bland grades (a literal 3.001 GPA) and the reason I'm in this future loan situation is because I lost a scholarship freshman year (pulled a lackluster 2.5, been busting my ass ever since). I'm hoping to graduate with around a 3.1-3.2, and was wondering if I would be able to graduate and find a job in the 60k-80k range right out of the gate. Thank you for any and all advice, I'm really clueless with personal finance and all of the knowledge I've accrued has literally just been from this past week of lurking.
Submitted July 06, 2017 at 10:17AM by ch4rts http://ift.tt/2ttNs8h
