OJ the PA

Did you know that the average anticipated debt load from PA school is $112,500 ?! So if you're wondering why a lot of my posts this year have been related to budget, this is why! I recently posted about the No Buy turning into a Low Buy , after a friend and I admitted to both feeling a bit burned out by the limits on our spending. But I'm not sure anymore that this plan is going to work for me. The No Buy started after I evaluated my 2019 spending habits and was left wondering, "where the heck is all my money going?!" I know a couple of things about myself -- I am not a fan of spreadsheets, and I can make excuses to buy just about anything. So I needed a simple strategy to limit my spending, and thanks to some YouTube inspiration, my own version of a No Buy was born. And so far, it's been pretty successful. I am spending 71% of my monthly average from 2019. I was able to save enough to pay off my car loan early , while still having a decent amount of savings to f...

Guess what? I just reached 500 followers on my Instagram ! I think it's so cool that people are interested in my dietitian-to-PA journey. I've also started sharing short videos in my Instagram stories about nutrition topics that I think would be of interest to my followers, and so far they've been well received. With that in mind, I thought it would be fun to walk through a day in the life of a dietitian, because I think a lot of people don't really understand what we really do all day. Now, dietitians can work in a variety of areas -- food service, outpatient care, bariatric surgery, oncology, school nutrition, dialysis centers, private practice, etc -- and each one of our days would probably look quite different. So, this is my perspective, as a clinical dietitian in a large metro hospital. Side note #1: this is what life looks like this summer, while I'm not taking any classes. Things are WAY more hectic when I'm also taking classes! Side note #2: this day is...

Yup, it happened. I broke. I bought a pair of shoes. Which, if you know me, is kind of strange because I'm not really a big shoes person. But I have a bunch of sandals that are old and worn out, and I've been dying to have a pair of Birkenstocks for over a year now (which are obviously too spendy). So I think this longstanding want plus too much deprivation led to me ordering a nice pair of White Mountains (with a discount, of course). It took me days to actually pull the trigger and buy them. I knew it was breaking the rules. But then I said, "to heck with it!" and here we are. In my post about June's No Buy results , I mentioned that my friend who is doing this with me and I are really getting sick of this whole thing. We've been at it diligently for 6 months and even though we were both cruising along just fine for quite awhile, we've majorly hit a wall. A big part of me wanted to say, "well, we did it for six months and that's already a big ac...

As a distance education student, I complete the didactic year over two years. This means I get the summer between my first and second years off. YAY. But like a good PA student, I didn't want this time to be totally wasted. So I put together a very ambitious study schedule to make sure I reviewed everything I learned over the first year. *brushes shoulders off* As it turns out, that was far too ambitious for a PA student who was both tired and no longer operating under the crippling fear of failure. I fell off the wagon just about as fast I got on it. Well, shoot. I had planned to study a little bit every day, which was in fact not reasonable. So I readjusted. I'd spend a few hours on the weekends and as well as on my one day off during the week. This worked much better, giving me a few days each week to just enjoy the summer and being a lazy lump on the couch. I also decided to change what I was studying. I have felt like antibiotics go right over my head. So, that needed to b...

I don't want to talk about it. Okay, fine. I'll talk about it. But I went off the rails a bit this month. Big time. I spent 112% of my average spending from 2019. And you know what? I blame my vacation. But you're supposed to enjoy yourself on vacation so I guess I just need to suck it up and deal with it. Here's some of what happened: $325 on hotels. The drive to visit my sister was 17 hours each way and I wasn't about to do that alone in one stretch. So I had two hotels for that. Plus, we stayed in a hotel near the Rocky Mountain National Park with a balcony and a great view of the mountains. $300 on gas, an oil change before I left, and a car wash. Sh*t, that was a lot more than I anticipated it would be. $280 on restaurants and dining. Meals on the road, lots of fun places to eat in Colorado, and a few times I ate out this month with friends before I left. Adds up quick, doesn't it? I also bought some souvenirs, because no travel for me is complete without a...