Show Me the Money

So the financial repercussions of living in an amazing apartment in the middle of London for 155 pounds a week only recently hit me.

Last night I calculated how much money was left over for the first term once I substracted the cost of the absolute necessities (i.e. rent, bills, food, and tuition) from my student loan. I ended up staring incredulously at the figure on the calculator.

2700 Kronor. 240 pounds.

The fuck? How am I supposed to take the tube? Go to the gym? Pay my phone bill? (Including the 100 pounds I owe from this summer?!) Go out?! Buy a regular stash of tampons?!

I can't, that's how.

So here are a few things I am going to have to do in order to deal with this unfortunate situation.

1. Hare Krishna
   This is just too obvious. Free food! Every day at SOAS, Hare Krishna gives out free curry for lunch (to those willing to stand in line for eternity). I do not entirely understand the motive to this, and can only assume that they pity the poor souls of skint students such as myself.
   
2. Stop partying
   Hah, no. As if. I can however, chose to take part in more of the Ladies Night extravaganzas (free for ladies, 50 pound entry for men!), go to clubs early to skip the entry fee (hmmm), frequent house parties, and especially: continue to favour Moonies, UCL's favourite club! I'll save money via the mere 1 pound entry fee, and in the long term will lower my electricity bills! There is after all no point in charging my ipod for the five days following a night at Moonies seeing that the place always makes me deaf.
3. Skip the cloak room fee
   On the clubbing note: Why keep spending 2 pounds per jacket upon entry to a club? Just be wise and either a) strategically hide your coat under sofas, signs, large people, tables etc b) get a man to hold it for you, or c) go out without one, even if the line is an hour long, even if the temperature is 5 degrees Celsius. True story.
4. Not drink
   That's not a joke. I very very rarely drink on nights out, and intend to keep it that way. Even spending 15 pounds on drinks twice a week for a whole term adds up to about 450 pounds. And some people blow 50 pounds a night. Yeah as if I am going to drink my money away in such a manner. Only to barf it up again by 3am.
5. Buy in Bulk
   Cereal, shampoo, rice, washing detergent... This is a boring one to mention but important! Living as a five actually makes this one feasible! Otherwise...
6. The 99p Store
   This hardly needs a description. The 99p shop has everything from banana chips (my one true love from the dried fruit department) to six year old shampoo (Hey it's 99p for a reason).
7. Shower less at home
   No this doesn't mean I'm going to stink up the flat. Just that I'll spend less time forking out money for my water bill and more time showering at the gym where water is part of the package. I'm Swedish: I don't mind constantly showering with other women!
8. Walk
   I am a big fan of natural forms of transport. This incidentally can also be interpreted as someone else doing the walking for me, i.e. forcing a friend to carry me home, as often happens on the way back from nights out when my feet have become unconscious.
9. Be a gold digger
   No explanation needed.
10. Go anorexic
    Because chowing down 4 servings of Dal bhat for lunch, as I regretfully did today, really does not do good things for the wallet. Or thighs.
11. Get a job
    Oh right. That.

Ok so numbers 9 and 10 might be verging on dramaqueen, but they certainly have elements of truth to them. I used to refuse being paid for by men, whether it concerned a drink or an expensive taxi fare - I liked my independence! Yet I have a new found appreciation of chivalry, and now figure that allowing a man to occasionally pick up the cheque can be quite the reinforcement in terms of skirting a situation involving groveling on the floor to my father, begging for money. Which would be a slightly worse set back to the whole independence thing.

There will of course be the general scouting for free events, from carnivals to cheese tasting (oh please God let that exist), which will be part of my 'Do Something New Every Week' challenge. Although I am still in Stockholm, I managed to get a head start. This week I went to a talk by Hans Rosling on Global Health, and was absolutely blown away by his intelligence, passion, and the actual content of his presentation. I will possibly write more about him and my aspirations another time, but I will at least reiterate one thing he mentioned:

Poverty: living on less than a dollar a day.
Study-loan standard of living: 30 dollars a day. 

Put more visually, I find myself on the tip of the second hump on this graph of his. Even set to a logarithmic scale, it is staggeringly obvious how fortunate I am relative to the large majority of this world's population. Which evokes a pang of guilt for all the times I've moaned about being poor. I truly am thankful for my life and all its possibilities. I'm a lucky lucky girl!


But I am, mind you, still keeping an eye out for a sugar daddy.