JULE >> Hello everyone! I'm Jule. I'm a second year PhD student studying computer
science. My area of concentration is artificial intelligence and this is my
vlog! So today I'm going to talk about budgeting on a grad student stipend.
Like most PhD programs the one I'm in is funded which means that my tuition is
paid for and I get a monthly stipend for living expenses. So at Michigan the
stipend is $2,500 so after taxes that's $2,334.
All right so now I want to go through how exactly I spend this $2334
each month. So my first big expense is housing so for this apartment I pay
$825 a month plus about $75
for utilities. So right now I live with two other roommates in a 3-bedroom
apartment I think this place is really nice it has a big living room a really
big kitchen I have my own room with a balcony but if you want to spend less
money that's also possible. If you want to share a room you can get places as
low as $500. If you want your own room you can still get places as low as
around $700 and if you want your own place without any roommates that's gonna
be around $1200+. Alright so my next big expense is
groceries so I really like food I like eating well so I like to spend a lot of
money in this area of my life. So I budget seventy dollars a week for
groceries which is about three hundred and one a month so usually I'm a little
below this so every week my grocery bill is between fifty and sixty dollars but I
like having that extra space in case I need to make any additional purchases
For this amount of money I think I eat pretty well. I also really love baking so
I buy a lot of flour and sugar and things
like that. I'm actually making a cake right now for Super Bowl Sunday. So with
this budget I could buy good food I can cook and I
can bake things I want to bake and then I also budget about ten dollars a day
for fun random things so that's gonna be like getting coffee going out to eat
with friends and uber so that makes about 70 a week which is are also around
three hundred and one a month. So I find this is plenty of money to have fun in
Ann Arbor I definitely don't spend ten dollars
every day so it kind of adds up and then on the weekend I have some extra so this
has worked really well for me. Then with some of the extra money I donate to
charity so I donate about seventy five dollars a
month to charity and I find this really helps me stay grounded keep me from
buying too many things I don't actually need and remind me how blessed I am to
be in a situation I am in. So with the rest of the money I put it towards
savings so that's seven hundred and fifty seven dollars part of that savings
goes towards vacation I love solo traveling and so I like to put aside
around two hundred and seventy-five a month towards vacationing so that ends
up being around $3300 every year and I find that plenty to travel the world.
This year I'm planning kind of a smaller trip going to Glacier National Park the
idea is to save some money so next year I can go on a really big Portugal trip
and go to the mainland as well as some of the surrounding islands. So I've been
to places like Hawaii Quebec Iceland the Azores so this is all very possible on a
grad student stipend. So the rest of the savings I just save it's good to have at
least three months worth of living expenses saved away in case of
an emergency so I like to keep around $5,000 in my account at all times and
then I also use this money for any big surprise purchases for example if my
computer breaks or my phone breaks or I need a new pair of winter boots that's
where I get that money from. So one big expense that I don't have is a car so
that would definitely eat into your budget a bit I found a car isn't really
necessary. I take the bus everywhere as well as the occasional uber I do know a
lot of grad students who have cars though and so it's definitely doable
with a grad student stipend. Alright that's the end of my vlog thank you for
watching and hopefully you found some of this information useful