Helping out

DD bought herself a (supposedly) good Sony 2-in-1 touchscreen laptop about a year ago. It's been nothing but problems. The screen freezes and other issues. She has had it back in to the store at least a couple of times. Then it would work for awhile and a month or two later back at problems. It sat unused all the month of Christmas break and when she got back to school it worked fine - until this week.

She messaged me around dinner time last night that it was not working again and all her chemistry homework this quarter is done online. She was thinking about dipping into her savings account and just buying (another) new one. Right as she was typing that I was typing out that I would buy her a new one - but it would just have to be a basic, no frills, laptop (ie in my budget) that works good (like the Toshiba we have for DH for last 8 years). Then she replied "OMG! Really?!  Can I add some of my own money to it?"  I said if you want to, sure.  I told her I was willing to put $300 towards it for her.

Within 15 minutes she was at Best Buy (the perks of living in a small town where it only takes 5 minutes to get anywhere) and sought the advice of the salesperson, this time, on a dependable laptop in her price range. She ended up buying a Lenovo (one of her suitemates has a Lenovo all school year with no problems) for $450. It is also a 2-in-1 touchscreen, so hopefully it will work better than her first one.  I think many of our salespeople's laptops at work are Lenovo's.

I was glad to finally be in a position where I can help her out like that. She was very appreciative and I know having a reliable laptop is a must in college. Some of her tests are even done on the computer and she'd rather not have to always be going to the computer lab. I know she is trying to use as little of her savings as possible while going to school and not working. She finally got smart for this quarter and realized she needs to be using all her meal plan and not spending money every week at the grocery store to put food in her dorm. She wasn't eating in the dining hall much, but now she is for breakfast and dinners. Her meal plan also has "dining dollars" which she can use at various places on campus - Starbucks, Subway, etc. The dollars roll forward to the next quarter and she has a lot of dollars left from the first 2 quarters. I asked her if there was some kind of small campus type of store where she could use those dollars, to buy milk, juice, snacks, etc that she keeps buying at the grocery store and there is, so she is going to start using up her dining dollars to purchase from there instead of using her own savings money.

I give her $100 a month, but that was supposed to mainly be for money for activities. She does some, but if not, she puts it towards her phone bill or gas for her car. She has to do an internship this summer and they are all paying jobs, averaging about $2500 a month so she should be able to save $5000-$7000 this summer......as long as she doesn't end up with a ghastly commute and have to spend it all on gas to get to the internship.

She spoke with her adviser yesterday about her terrible physics grade. She has to retake the class and get at least a B+ and at least an A- this quarter in Chemistry, to get her GPA where it needs to be for her degree program. Eek. She will have to take the Physics again next Fall quarter, but she is going to check and see if it's something she can take this summer at our local community college instead and transfer the credits to her school. She already took a Chem class while she was at the community college (but for some reason it wouldn't transfer) and she got an A- or B+ so hopefully this will basically be just a refresher for her and she'll be able to get that A out of it she needs.