Confused about what you might need for your kitchen when moving to your first place? Check out this handy guide on kitchen and pantry staples (thanks to Dining Services)! Keep in mind that you can take this list and modify it to suit your own needs.
We have also reproduced the information below so be sure to continue reading!
As we rapidly approach the end of the semester, here are the events we will be holding during Senior Week 2017. Stop by any of these events to learn about particular topics that may apply to your life after Bryn Mawr!
Can you pay my bills? Budgeting & basic financial mindfulness after BMC
Dorothy Vernon Room, New Dorm Dining Hall
12-1PM
May 8
“Can you pay my bills? Budgeting & financial mindfulness after BMC” will explore how to proactively think about your finances after graduating, including how to budget within your salary, how to save money, how to assess spending priorities etc. The content of this session will primarily come from first person experience, shared by current young staff members, as well as tried and true best practice tips. We will also be providing you with online resources to peruse as you start to piece together what your post-grad spending will look like.
Life After the Meal Plan
Dorothy Vernon Room, New Dorm Dining Hall
12-1PM
May 9
Bryn Mawr College Dining Services Assistant Director, Richard Clow, will provide tips on how to equip your kitchen, resources for cookbooks and healthy eating on a budget!
At our most recent Life After Bryn Mawr event on April 10th, members of the Life After Bryn Mawr Committee (Rachel Heiser, Jancy Munguia ’14 and Palak Bhandari ’16) and Cruz Arroyo, Administrative Assistant in LILAC, discussed the basics of navigating housing after Bryn Mawr.
For those of you that may have missed this session, we will be planning to hold a second session during Senior Week 2017. Below is a compilation of some of the important takeaways from this session.
Key People to know about when finding housing
When finding housing, it is important to know the different people you may come into contact with throughout the search process and while you are renting a property.
Realtor – Essentially the person that helps to generate interest in a property and connects two parties; after finding housing, you may not interact with a realtor as frequently, if at all.
Landlord/Property Manager – The person who arranges the lease agreement, takes care of daily needs at the property and is the go-to person for maintenance needs
Property Owner – The person who actually owns the building and land that the property is on.
This week, we have a guest post from a 2014 graduate, Amanda Beardall! After Amanda graduated, she went on to serve as an AmeriCorps*VISTA member in Philadelphia, PA. She writes about her experience living at a poverty line salary and how she learned to budget for food. We hope to have posts each week so please send your submissions to bmclifehacks@gmail.com if this is something you’re interested in!
Check out these articles about cooking and grocery shopping with food stamps:
I used all four years of College to ignore my debt. It was a burden I wasn’t ready to carry and also at that point I wasn’t really convinced that I would dig myself into a financial hole. If I was already conscience about how I spent my money – why would I ever wind up $30,000 in debt? It didn’t make sense, but I knew that it went hand-in-hand with my financial aid packet. So, if I wanted to go to school and graduate – I would take the financial aid packet and work whenever I had free time.
Because I was avoiding by loans, I thought I had more money than I really did. I did not pay attention to how I was budgeting, if I had cut back on a few cups of coffee here and there – I could have freed up some extra cash. And that cash could have ensured, at the least, that my interest was not growing at rapid speeds. I was convinced that I was a victim of my loans. Anytime student loans were brought up, I would zip out of that room faster than you could say “principal balance”. I was in the same situation Ariel was when she had to give her voice to Ursela in order to have a pair of legs. I had to take on these loans to get a leg up in the job market. Then I started telling myself – if everyone else had debts, what did my debt really mean? It wasn’t like I was the only one getting a ‘F’ in a class full of ‘A’s’ – I was getting a ‘F’ along side all the other ‘F’s’. So really ground zero wasn’t being free of debt – it was -$30,000.
Then I graduated, and along side the quarter life crisis, I was realizing that I needed to do something about those loans. That first month out of College, oh boy, I kept finding myself contemplating about life, death and nihilism. I wasn’t getting any answers, but the pressure was still there. This was the turning point – the very first step: Acknowledging that I had loans, and I could do something about it. Continue reading