I realize this thread is pretty dead now, but just found it and after making my last post I got so interested I read through the whole thing (instead of sleeping like I should be doing right now). Here are my thoughts.
I know the whole live in a cheap area was a joke, but I would also like to share my experience on that. If you are considering a cheap apartment just remember there is a reason it is cheap.
We lived in a really cheap apartment that looked nice, but was actually a hang out for gangs, had random guys rapping in the parking lot in the middle of the day and common shootings at the Wal Mart down the road. We were there about 6 months when we got robbed really badly in the middle of the day while it was raining and I had only been gone about 3 hours. About $8000 worth. I didn't even realize we had that much stuff.
The worse part was our little dog (pictured in my avatar) was home and had a seizure a few days later that we think was brought on my stress. He still will not greet my husband at the door when he comes home unless I am already home. Instead he runs and hides until he hears his name called. He use to run and say hello the second he got home.
I basically cried everyday until we finally just decided it was not worth it and moved to another apartment. We paid 2 rents for several months until finally finding a sub-leaser that would take that hell hole from us. We were honest about the reason we were moving so I am not surprised most people turned down our offer of subsidizing the rent on an already really cheap place. When we figured up our deductible (I am a HUGE fan of renters insurance. Even if you are on a budget make sure you get this. It is only about $10 a month and worth it if anything happens. some of you may still be covered on your parents home owner insurance. Look into that before getting your own policy.) the double rent for several months, the amount we paid someone to take over the lease, moving expenses etc we could have lived in a luxury apartment downtown for that 6 months. Not worth it at all.
Instead my recommendation for saving money on rent is to live with roommates. In college I lived in a huge house with 8 girls and the rent was SOOO cheap. My husband and I signed a lease for a place by ourselves for his first year of vet school just because we don't know anyone, but after we make some friends we plan to hopefully have roommates for future years to cut down on costs. Yes we are married and are use to having our own place, but that was when we were not raking up twice what we were making in debt. And the benefits for someone that would be our roommate is that we only take up one room, but would of course be paying a larger portion of rent since there are 2 of us.
Also take a look at the type of loans you are being offered. We will never turn down free money or a subsidized loan even if we don't think we need it right now, but when it gets to the higher interest loans we will be taking a hard look at savings to see if we think we could swing it without having to add to the debt. I know we are a little different situation than most as I will be working so we will still have some income, but if you have savings you may want to pull into it some if you can do so with still leaving a cushion.
Loving everyone's food recommendations and I am even going to check out that mint.com sight to see if it could help us. I recommend shopping at Aldi if you have one in your area. My husband use to work there and we shop there all the time. They do not have EVERYTHING, but their selection is getting better and you can cross off the majority of what is on your list and then run to another grocery for the last few items. Well worth it. You can get a full cart (and their carts are huge) for about $50-$70 while that would be about $120 anywhere else we go.
And my last recommendation now that I have wrote a complete book on a thread that seems to be dead anyway. When we signed our lease for this coming August we purposely chose a unit close to the office in hopes we can pick up on wireless. Other things we have done to save money on the cable bill: Only get internet not tv and when you promotion runs out call them or go into a location. You may not get as good of a deal as the first promotion, but we have always found they can sign us up for another promotion that ends up being about half off the full price. I have just told them we cannot pay the full price and suddenly a deal they forgot about comes to them. At our last place we made friends with a neighbor that we shared internet with. This was a great set up as he was already renting a modem and we owned a modem that also had built in wireless (that modem has also saved me a lot of money over the 5 years I have had it) he was so happy to have wireless he didn't even have us chip in for the monthly bill even after we offered. Great deal!
