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If you don’t have your own car, you will have to rely on public transportation every day you are working, both to and from your job. We’ll assign a cost of $2 each way for your regular bus or train, and that will come to $4 per day. If you work a typical nine-to-five job from Monday to Friday, you will first multiply that $4 by the five days you’re working, which comes to $20 per week. Now multiply that $20 by the average of four weeks per month, and you now have an expense of $80 per month for transportation. When you subtract $80 from $700, you now have $620. And you’re still not done with the expenses, since you still have to cover the costs of food and clothing. You were planning on eating and wearing some decent clothes, weren’t you?

Now we’ll tackle the groceries – restaurants aren’t included in this exercise – which we will give a conservative estimate of $60 per week. Multiplied by four weeks, your monthly grocery expense will be $240, which you will subtract from the $620. This will leave you with only $380 for the remainder of the month, and you have one final expense to cover; buying clothing for both work and play. Let’s assume that you don’t have a suitable working wardrobe, and your job is in a conservative industry, such as a bank or corporate office. Chances are, the casual clothes you’ve been sporting so far will not cut it at work. If suits are a must in your new job, you’ll have to spring for at least one, plus the necessary accessories to go with it. Since you only have $380 for the rest of the month, you should stick with discount stores for the time being. Expensive designer clothes are not an option at this point. We’ll imagine that you got incredibly lucky and bought what you needed for just $150. Subtract this total from $380, and you are left with a "grand" total of $230.

From $1,500 down to $230; it’s not nearly as much as you thought, was it. And the amounts for basic expenses were much more conservative than they often turn out to be in real life. If you live in an expensive city like New York or Los Angeles, your costs will probably be considerably higher than the ones I quoted previously. That was just a hypothetical exercise, to help you go through the process of subtracting monthly costs from your income. If your expenses exceed your income every month, it’s not a question of if you will incur high amounts of debt. That’s a certainty. The real question is how long it will take before you fall into the pit. This is why it is so important for you to put together a plan now, before making the final move. The better the plan, the better your odds of maintaining a financially healthy and debt-free lifestyle. And I’ll take being debt-free over being debt-burdened anytime.