Making Round-Pegged, Square-Holed Ends Meet

My anticipated school tuition/fees charge is $2,060, which needs to be paid end of the month. The total pool of my various financial accounts is $1734.37, with an additional $36ish in cash and a whole pile in change, which I kind of need for eating, so that cash-and-pile is out of the question. Going then from just the $1734, then, the question is: how do we make the ends meet? There's a, let's see, $325.63 difference. You know what, I don't need ALL of my pile of change, let's call that $325 even.

What other assets do I have?

I'm sitting an EE savings bond taken out soon after my birth, which matures soon after I turn 30. Right now it's a little over $163 in value, and that's money in my pocket if I cash that now. If I wait till I'm 30, though, it's going to be, shoot how much did I calculate it at, shoot it'd be almost $300 if I continue sitting on it. Both figures are something we should take into consideration.

I worked exactly 2 hours which I did not report, odd jobs and spring cleanup around the apartments at a rate of $10 an hour. That's $20 uncashed, if it's not too late and/or awkward to bring that up to the managers...

There's something like $89.04 that I'm owed from this mass SeaFall and Dead of Winter order from Plaid Hat, where we all (Ryan and Alex and I) chipped in but I did the actual paying.

Pool those together, and we're at... $272.56. Getting somewhere. Just $52.44 needed to make that up.

Plasma donation nets me $65 a week, if all goes well and I'm not temporarily deferred like what happens with too high a frequency for it to be that reliable an income for much more than feeding me. And I do need to be fed, for that; blood protein levels go too low and they tell you to come back tomorrow, so there's always at least half of that income that I need to put aside just for my mouth. Let's say that I do manage to subside on ramen for a bit, though, and ta-da I've covered my entire tuition fee between those five things. There still simply isn't enough...

I'm talking about textbooks. Textbooks cost, and they cost money. And I've got like, hold on let me check, yes five of them this semester. My graphic design and printmaking courses on top of that cost about $130 between them, though I'm pretty sure that that cost is already accounted for on top of tuition in the "total fees owed" figure, which once again is $2,060 this semester. I've checked the textbooks, all; they're all relatively inexpensive, but in total they're still going to cost me a (very cool) hundred or so. I think I do have a savior around that as well, though.

Textbooks cost money to buy, and thus they have a corollary in that they pay money to sell. Last semester I bought all of my textbooks, to sell them back at the end of the semester though -oops!- I missed the buyback period. There is a textbook place in town, cheaper rates on buying and renting, which I'm pretty sure buys textbooks the year 'round so who needs the university bookstore's buyback program--but the cheaper buy/rent price they're selling the books for on the outward end also means less money they're buying the books for on the inward end. Like cashing in the savings bond half a decade early, it'd be the most convenient and immediate return on my investment, but it wouldn't be the best deal on it. I'll head by the Book Viking tomorrow, check the details.

There are a few other moneymaking opportunities available to me. I am sitting on quite possibly one of the greatest collections of Zootopia merchandise in at least the state... I'm far from considering selling it, I'm way too proud for that, but I do have a couple of redundant items in the collection I bought accidentally... A Nick Wilde plush and a Clawhauser action figure. If I can fence those for half the cash I spent on them... well then I'd have, let me check my spreadsheet, $10.50, thereabout. Half of what I spent on them, obviously, not the best-case scenario, but that's still a, who's on the $10, ooh sweet a Hamilton, in my pocket.

I suppose that there are one or two other purchases I regret making, non-food-wise, which I guess I could, sell. A bamboo stylus that was on discount, which claimed to be compatible with "pen-enabled" technology, and it turns out what that means is you need to download the driver which is for free, only you need to do it to your Windows-8-or-higher tablet computer, which I conveniently have 0 of. Also conveniently, the pen being on discount (but still costing me $29.96) was non refundable. They usually cost about $10 more than $30, so even if I sell it somewhere somehow for exactly as much money I got it for, it'd still be a good deal for the receiving end.

So... I think... I can definitely do this. If I go for brokish, and drain all of my accounts, and sell a few things maybe, and cash in things well before they're matured, I can pay for this semester-in-between-Pell-grants without going into debt. Hopefully by the end of the semester, as well, I'll have had a semester's worth of job money from Artco as well, and after that we'll see if that position as a graphic designer on campus opens up again like it's supposed to winter semester. After this, hopefully, I won't back myself into any of these little tight spots again.

I look over at the talking Nick Wilde plush sitting in the Zootopia pile adjacent to me right now (Squeeze for Sounds!), and yeah, no regrets.

Except for those already delineated of course...

In news only tangentially related to my financial situation, I've decided that I don't need an elaborate costume this year for Halloween, handmade though from pricey materials... turns out that trick-or-treating isn't even allowed in the city of Rexburg, what kind of crap is that...