HOW I PAID FOR MY FIRST APARTMENT AT 18
In the summer of 2021, I started off with a few thousand dollars in my savings account. During the week I would private tutor 1-2x, and work at a shirt printing factory making $25/hour, and on weekends I would work at a brewery. I tried to consistently put away as much money as I could into a savings account, without restricting myself from doing things I wanted. Life is about balance. Still, this wasn’t enough to pay a year’s worth of rent.
As a baseline, my rent was $525 for a shared (very large) bedroom. The apartment was 2 bedrooms, 1 bathroom and I lived there with my two roommates, Sophie and Kait. We each had to pay an additional ~$50 every month to cover electricity and gas expenses. Roughly, I would have needed $7000 to pay off a 12-month lease (and I wasn’t about to deplete my entire savings account in the process). This is where having a solid resume started to really pay off.
That same summer, I was approached by a UCONN faculty member to start summer work for a startup, where I would be paid to take part in sales pitch competitions for them. The only reason I was approached for this job is because the right person saw my resume at the right time. They thought I was qualified based off my highschool experiences with business competitions/clubs and my involvement at UCONN. This job also paid $25/hour and only took five hours out of my week but I was getting paid $500 at the end of the month for something that I was having fun with and learning from. The money I made from this went straight into a savings account and by the end of the summer, that practically covered three months of rent. Lastly, and most importantly, I got involved with a program called F3 at UCONN which stands for Freshman Female Founders. This program included a $3000 stipend as part of our summer internship. Starting this blog did not cost me $3000, so I was able to save a lot of that and put it into my savings. Soon I started to realize it would actually become feasible for me to pay rent, and with having an on-campus job all year I knew I would have income set aside for groceries.
Groceries were ~$150 every 2 weeks, and I mostly shopped at Trader Joe’s. If you’re trying to save your money but don’t know where to start, a good rule of thumb is to try and only spend 10-20% of your paycheck and put the rest into a savings account. This would require living a very frugal lifestyle but it can be done.
I hope you guys were able to gain some insight from this blog post and as always, you can reach out to me through the contact button or message me on Instagram @shiftwithyuliana.
