Fun Funding Math!

[lycoris]

I'm trying to figure out how my relative income will change next year, so I've spent some of the afternoon playing with calculators instead of the tedious projects I'm supposed to be working on. The the result is some fun (if not very accurate, and perhaps overly-optimistic) math, which I'd be happy to know whether anyone else finds even remotely accurate (I'm looking at you, Finance students):

1) If the stipend I've been offered is 48% of what I'm earning now, but the university pays 100% of my health insurance premium, and student transit passes are far less expensive than my current pre-tax transit ($50 a quarter instead of $80 a month), I figure I can start from a base of 9% less than I'm making now, which then makes the stipend 52% of what I'm currently earning.

2) If the amount I pay toward taxes (currently about 20.5 of my taxable, that is, post-healthcare, post-transit, post-retirement savings, income) and SS and Medicare remains unchanged (which it may not - I posted about that elsewhere, but does anyone know?), I get a little extra boost, because 20.5% of 52% of my income is less than 20.5% of 100% of my income, which brings me up to a whopping 53% of my current income.

3) Then, if I factor in that the funding package is supposed to be for 9 months and cross my fingers that I can get summer funding (through the U or from an independent source, or maybe as a camp counselor or temp or something) at a comparable level, and my anticipated income goes up by 25%, it becomes a full 66% of my current income.

4) If I also take into consideration that I spend approximately 42% of my current take-home pay (32.5% of my taxable monthly income) on debt that will be either paid off or in deferment next fall, I can assume that my costs will also go down enough that my relative income will appear to have gone UP by 26%, after taxes. (Yes, I am spending a ridiculous portion of my income making up for bad decisions I made years ago. I am THIIIIIISSS close to being, if not debt-free, then at least reasonably-indebted, and hopefully able to forget about it, more or less, for a little while - though I will continue to make small payments on my remaining student loans if I can.)

5) Of course, the cost of living in my new city will also increase by between 23% and 27% according to CNN (I'm a little confused about how to calculate that, exactly - they suggest housing will go up by 87% and groceries by 2%, but utilities will go down by 34%; the portion of my pay that I spend on different expenses is probably not the same as their figure, and I'm not sure how to adjust for that), so I'm looking at this as more or less a wash.

Of course, I am a humanist, and not a CPA, so I could be completely wrong about all of this.

[thepoorstockinger]

I feel like many students in the humanities (myself included) use spreadsheets more when it comes to figuring out grad school funding then they do when it comes to actual school work.