There are three types of people when it comes to spending DCB.
First, there are those rare people with great self-control what budget their DCB and actually stick to it. Sophomore accounting major Hollee Phelps is one of those people.
Phelps said she took the amount of DCB she had at the beginning of the year and divided it by the number of weeks in the semester to get an estimate of how much money she would allow herself to spend each week.
“I say estimate because I do not always spend all of what I budget for a week, so sometimes I have more the next the week,” Phelps said. “It is all about balance and knowing how much money you have.”
She advised those who struggle with maintaining DCB to make a habit of asking for receipts. She also said she recommended using a checkbook app to keep up with how much money you spend and what you spend it on each month.
“There are many (apps) that are similar and free so it just depends on your preferences,” Phelps said. “And recently, I found through a very vague Google search that you can check your DCB online. This is great if you don’t want to go through the trouble of recording everything.”
On the opposite side of the spectrum, there are the people like me who throw budgets out the window and blow all their DCB before Spring Break. Junior David Taylor said he falls into this category, because he usually runs out of DCB halfway through the semester.
“My motto is ‘I only get what I need,’” Taylor said. “But I seem to always need coffee or some tacos daily.”
Taylor said he spends most of his DCB on crunchy tacos from Taco Bell and, even though he’s tried, he just hasn’t been able to kick the habit.
“I tried to make it further this semester by only eating Taco Bell once a week, but I found myself getting more coffee with all of my extra DCB I was saving,” Taylor said. “It is a real struggle because I think of it as invisible money. It doesn’t feel like real money, so I just spend DCB anytime I have a craving.”
Finally, there are people who, believe it or not, completely forget about their DCB and end up having $100 to spend in the last few weeks of the school year. A tip for those of you who spend it all super quickly: find a friend like sophomore Mariah McClellan, who forgot to spend her DCB freshman year.
“I had it in my head for some reason that it wasn’t something I should be spending, like it was really important, and I needed to save it for something,” McClellan said. “I guess in my head I just thought this DCB is a big deal, and you better not waste it.”
McClellan said she had so much left at the end of last year that she could not spend it all by herself, and she ended up paying for her friend’s coffees or Chick-fil-A lunches. She said she even bought lunch for someone she had just met 10 minutes before.
“I think it was like the last month or two of school when I literally just started offering to buy people things,” McClellan said. “I think the last two weeks of school, I bought a bagel and coffee from Einstein’s every day. I just bought a lot of stuff and bought other people a lot of stuff.”
