Considering that I've never had to do work-study before, I'm admitting to being totally new to this. In undergrad, I worked 30 hours a week as a manager at a small health food store. It paid my bills (usually!) on top of going to school full time and I had minimal loans left over which are now paid off. I am starting my masters program next week with a clean slate. In sitting down to create a budget, I've run into a few road blocks that I should have calculated into this as I made my decision to attend this spring. With that being said..
I have an allotted $3,000/semester for work-study. That is a lot! I got hired on in the library for a really sweet job in special collections. But considering that I can't be working more than 10-15 hours and I get paid $10/hr, I will be making maybe half of what I've been allotted for. When I sat down to figure out what kind of money I'd have to pay rent with, buy groceries with, etc. I included that chunk of money. Here's the question: How the heck does work-study work? I'm assuming it's different with each school but perhaps some shared experience with this would be helpful. I know that my pay from my work-study job gets paid to me.. so am I setting up a plan to pay that to the school? If so, what about the other chunk of money that is somehow expected of me but will probably not be reached?
I was under the impression that I was taking out a bunch of loans so that I could pay my new big city rent, buy food, etc. and now I'm not sure about work-study, my scholarship and grant have not yet been released so even though my loans have been, there's a big chunk of money still owed on tuition from the money on hold so I don't know when I will be getting my refund, thus not sure when I can pay my September 1st rent. There's a lot of questions here, I know! Sorry! I've called financial aid and left 2 messages today and yesterday - I know they're busy and it may be a few days before I hear back so I thought I'd see what I could get from this fantastic forum.Thanks guys!