I’d rather be frugal with a degree than dirt broke with one.

I’m a medical student. I’m starting a new semester on Monday and I’m prepping for it. In all my classes, a notebook and pen is the bare minimum. Some classes require a calculator, some classes require a computer. The most important material is online, and to access it you need a subscription account. The accounts don’t charge by user, just by institution. So you can put however many people you want into the account as long as you have a login and a password.<br><br>I already know a lot of people in my grade level. We all exchanged numbers in our first year and we’re all pretty tight so we talk each other through the best tools to get. I have a lot of experience in this. I keep finding that people all around me are so willing to spend money on the most unimportant things. Like, I asked around to see if anyone has access to one of these accounts that require a subscription and I found one. They’re happy to share and about a week later they’re like “so what exactly do I get out of this? Are you gonna buy me dinner every week or something?”<br><br>I get really frustrated with this. I’m not breaking the rules by doing this. I’m sharing an account with 4 different people and we’re all doing just fine. There’s an entire black market for shit like this at my med school and I’m not the only one who shares resources. I don’t think you should pay for things you don’t need to pay for, and you should probably help out the people who do pay a bit. This is a total of 4 people sharing an account so we are making our money back easily.<br><br>I’m a student, and I’m not often in a situation where I can pay back what they pay for, so I usually say I’ll pay back the cost of the thing with labor. In this case, I said I’d buy them dinner over the weekend.<br><br>They said that’s fine, but that they’d rather just buy the account for $50 a month. I’m broke, but I’d rather be broke than poor. Poor is when you don’t have money but you also don’t have common sense either. I’d rather be frugal with a degree than dirt broke with one, because one of those options is not going to end well.