As part of my internship at Xanga, I worked on a site called Dollarish, which is kind of a catch-all personal finance and job blog geared towards high school students and college students. Since I left, they’ve opened up an advice section of the site where there have been some good questions and some horrible ones. There was one this week that I just couldn’t leave alone.

What do you think an adequate allowance is for a college student that isn’t able to get a part time job?

Wanna know what my college allowance was? Zip, zero, nada, nothing. As a kid and a teenager, I didn’t get an allowance either. I pretty much just hoarded any money given to me for holidays and birthdays and used that over the course of the year. I had friends who would ask their parents for a $20 bill when they wanted to go to the movies. I asked my parents once for that because I didn’t have enough money myself, and I still remember that day. I was extremely embarrassed to ask them for it, even though they didn’t act like it a big deal. Since then, I haven’t remember asking my parents for money for anything. My parents buy me stuff sometimes, but even now I go back and forth on whether getting the item (generally clothing) is really worth the price, whether I think they can spend the money, etc, and I put back about 90% of what they offer to get me. I’m even like that with my own money and my boyfriend laughs at me for it: I look at an item, look again, think about getting it, work out how I can afford it, think maybe not, then think about getting it, then I almost buy it but ultimately put it back. When I write this out, it’s pretty ridiculous, but hey, it’s cheap.

However, back to the matter at hand. I had no allowance in college. I worked my butt off. I had a Federal Work Study job the first year, worked in a call center during the first semester of my junior year, and worked at an on campus IT help desk from spring of my junior year until the end. I didn’t work during my sophomore year because they revoked my Federal Work Study status (they didn’t have enough funding for out of state students, so I got the boot), and I was in the Rutgers Marching Band, which was a base 6 hour a week commitment, but usually was much more than that. To suppliment my work income, I did some GPT/PTC sites (Google it) and online surveys for online spending money and used MTurk extensively to pay for my books. I also got into an online focus group which also helped give me a lot of spending and textbook money.

I realize I might have been “lucky” with my financial situation in college, but I also saved a lot of money where my friends were wasting tons. I did my grocery shopping at Target and bought a lot of store brands. I didn’t go buy the newest Apple gadgets like my friends did. I bought clothes at TJ Maxx and Threadless when there were $10 sales. Very rarely did I get below $1000 in my main bank account. When I became a junior, my parents put a few hundred dollars in a separate account for repaying my student loans. They intended to put more in, but my parents’ jobs have been volatile and they never got the chance. Once they made the account, however, I started putting a portion of my paycheck into it every week. By the time I gradated, I had over $3000 in that account (with over a thousand in my main spending money). When I looked at other friends then, I had some that were living paycheck to paycheck and I was just amazed.

The main point of this is that unless there are extremely special circumstances, a college student should not get an allowance. When you start college, you are recognizing you are becoming an adult. Act like one, don’t live off Mommy and Daddy and whine how you don’t have enough money in your Coach wallet.