Eleven Thousand Fifty Fifty

Checking across all of my bank accounts and the receipts I saved, I can prove definitely that I have spent $7,486.48 on my education so far, meaning here rent, tuition, and school supplies, and actually it's probably a couple thousand more than that as well, but there appears to be a small but crucial lacuna in the form of my bank statement of january of last year, the last of my physical paper bank statements before switching over to digital. This is the month where I paid my first semester's tuition, and so there's more than $3000 that disappears from my checking account there in that gap that I can't track. $1500.48 of that goes into my savings, which leaves $1,668.10 to go to tuition, before I received reimbursement in the form of Pell Grant (the first thing that I have happening to me in my February bank statement,) which retroactively becomes what paid that cost.

The problem lies in my uncertainty whether tuition is the only thing that that money got spent on: $39.06 is the total price for preordering BARSK: THE ELEPHANTS' GRAVEYARD in both digital and hardcover when it first came out, so we'll say that first semester's tuition cost $1,629.04, meaning actually my total amount of money spent on college so far is about $9,115.52, or slightly less depending on whether I made any other purchases between when my statement provenance drops off and when it picks up again. Like I said, $7,486.48 is all that I can prove (the accessible part of the school's archive of your finances only goes back exactly 12 months so I can't look up the exact tuition fee, but the baseline seems to be higher than the $1,629.04 that had to have gone somewhere, so yeah it's all a very big mystery.) We can double-guess ourselves blind, though, so we'll just take that figure as being unmodified and thus accurate. $9,115.52.

$11,050.50 actually, if you round down (maybe using the exactly two cents I got for change one week ago) and count the $1,935 tuition for Spring semester of last year, which the Pell Grant automatically covered for me the way it's supposed to every time but only did the once for some reason. I guess we should be counting that too, even though that's not money which I ever touched? The $952 extra from that dole of the Pell Grant drifted past and glided to me like clockwork not long after. Which brings me to my second half: if I've spent $11,050.50 scholastically so far, how much have I received, and is there any excess money I've got, that would or would not be tied up into the legal obligation behind the execution of those funds?

No. There is not. There is no excess money. Even without calculating the tithes I should not have paid (I'm going to get on that later; it's easy enough to calculate how much tithing I spent, but harder to work out where that money actually came from if not scholarships,) $11,050.50 is more money than I received from grants and scholarships. Which is actually a good thing: 100% of the fundage I was legally obligated to spend on school, was spent on school, alongside a chunk of my personal cash (exactly how large that chunk is depends on whether we're counting non-official (i.e. parental) financial aid- without the latter, the chunk would be approximately the size of, my entire wages summer of '15, after tax rebate.)

So I'm out of scholarship money. I don't have to worry about what pile of economic slush I'm taking the money from when I make a purchase. I can still keep track of which of my expenditures are for school, so that I may retroactively use future scholarship money thus upon receipt, but my conscience can be clear regarding my obligation to spend scholarship and grant money exclusively scholastically.

Meanwhile, today marks the 20th anniversary of the release of the That Darn Cat remake. How auspicious!