I Hate Money.

This week's marriage class was on finances. So now I'm rapidly spiraling downward into clinical depression. It's not that I didn't know it was going to be tight for us, but putting it on paper really sucked. I have thought about putting together a budget countless times before now, but I really had no clue what to expect in terms of my medical school financial aid budget for living expenses so I figured it was probably useless to try to crunch numbers. Now that I've gotten into UMD, I used their living expense budget as an example to work with. I don't know if I've ever explained this before, so forgive me if I'm repeating myself, but med school financial aid works like this: No one works, everyone takes out loans for tuition and living expenses. That's just life, and there's no way around it. You simply CANNOT work your way through medical school. You will fail, or kill yourself, or both. So each school, depending on cost of living in its surrounding area and what kind of housing options, medical insurance, etc. it offers (if any), makes up a living expenses budget, which when combined with tuition and fees costs, becomes the maximum amount that they can qualify for in government grad loans. If the school says its students can live on $21,000 a year in living expenses, that's what they can borrow (plus tuition and fees obviously). If it says $13,000 a year, that's what they can borrow. Otherwise, you're looking at private students loans from banks, which rely on your credit score and the current economic climate (not so great, I'm sure you've noticed!), and always have a variable interest rate. Government loan rates are fixed, and some of them don't accrue interest while you're in school. So basically, a school can really screw you over financially if their budget doesn't really meet your realistic living expense needs. Since Hopkins offers cheap-ass first-year housing ($425 a month!), that's what they use to calculate living expenses. Comes out to less than $14,000 a year. I need to talk to them and find out if there's a different budget for married students who can't utilize that housing, but for now, it looks like I couldn't even afford to go there if, by chance, I were to get in. They also consider parent AND step-parent income when determining how much you're eligible to borrow, which would also screw me since my parents aren't helping me pay for this. Maryland, on the other hand, has a living expense budget of about $21,000 a year, which comes out to about $600 more per month to live on than Hopkins' budget. AND they consider students independent and don't ask for any parental information. YEAH.

So anyway, after putting it all down on paper, even with UMD's great living expense budget, it's still going to be rough. I hope you all will forgive me if I can't meet you for lunch or go out to the bar for a while... like the next 4 years! I know that God will provide, because like I keep saying, He didn't bring us this far to watch us crumble. And I know that if we're faithful in our giving, He will be faithful to bless us with what we need and more. It's so wonderful and comforting to have that promise to fall back on, and it's the only thing that's keeping me sane, really :) And I also know that Ben usually makes a good deal more than his base pay (which is what I used to create our budget) because he works a lot of overtime, so as long as the OT is still available, we'll have extra income. But we will DEFINITELY have to be cutting back. As Ben put it, from his oh-so-dramatic point of view, "we can't afford to have any fun" :) I don't think it's that bad, we just need to find inexpensive ways to have fun. Living so tightly won't be "fun", by any means, but we'll have plenty of our own happiness to enjoy. Just coming home to our own place and to each other every night sounds like an incredible amount of fun to me :)

This is a textbook, grade-A reality check for us, but it's putting us in the right frame of mind and preparing us for the challenges that we have ahead of us, which we may have under-estimated a little bit in the past. No one ever said married life would be easy, but with Ben, at least I know that it will never be dull or un-fulfilling. As my mom says, "Life is always an adventure with you, Ben" :) And that's what I have to look forward to! We'll have stories to tell about the days when we were poor, that's for sure.

Oh, and before I go, I got an acceptance letter from Drexel yesterday :) Absolutely not going there - I REALLY didn't like it when I visited - but it's still cool to get an acceptance from a medical school, regardless of which one it is. Yay!