When you say you have no money, people assume you mean "I have no money until payday" or "I have no money until my pension check or disability check comes." But for many of you and for me as well, it means I HAVE NO MONEY. No cash of any kind and no cash coming for quite some time.  All you can do in this situation, is watch the calendar like a dog watching a cat. Remember when you were a little kid and you thought if you went to bed and fell asleep Christmas would come sooner? Tried that. Having no cash in a so-called cashless society will truly make you stagger on the right side of insane. Now, don't get me wrong, I am a college student, and my wonderful parents do in fact give me a monthly budget. Unfortunately, upon dividing up my monthly budget, I find that most of it gets spent on food, so I usually end up with $0 to spend on anything fun to do, and sometimes I have to break into savings just to have a dollar or two extra. Here is my spending budget for last month so you can see what I mean. 

Groceries            Fast Food        Gas             School       

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17.58                    5.43              46.18           15.12              

10.31                    8.44                                    9.14                

25.68                    6.29                                                                                              

18.34                    5.43

10.02                    5.43

  4.19

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86.12                    31.02             46.18            24.26           

Now, there's an extra $16.94 in there for beauty, $4.03 on paint for my painting hobby, and $2.16 spent on decorations for my fish tank, but what is there is what is the most important spending habits.

Add all these things together....and you have these nasty totals per category, and then the appalling final count of $210.74. Gross right? In one month, 41% of my money is spent on groceries, 15% is on fast food, so a grand total of 56% of all the money is spent on food in my ongoing attempt at being healthy and my good food addiction, even though I do have a dining hall pass. My avoidance of dining hall food is costing me big bucks, so I really need to kick it into gear and stop being so bad about spending money on groceries and fast food. Especially because fast food isn't a whole lot better than dining hall food for grease content.

Now here's the problem. I avoid the dining hall like the plague. I don't go there unless I absolutely have no other option, or I'm being dragged by friends. Just the smell makes me feel disgusting. I would rather eat my Ramen for every meal than go to the dining hall. But since I'm having issues with money, I need toughen up my stomach and prepare for many extra hours of exercise simply to survive the rest of the year without blowing my budget or my diet, and maybe then I'll have the cash to go out and have a little fun, because right now I can't even afford a Netflix account to watch movies on to pass the time.

Wish me luck. Here I go....