<prompt> Human: Background information Myself 22, my fiance 22 and our daughter 18 months live in a 1 bedroom apartment. We both work part-time. Im a full-time college student and he goes part-time. We typically take home 1800month. Current Situation In an effort to put more money into savings with the goal of being able to afford a down payment on a house within 5 years I drafted a budget that I think will work pretty well. I budgeted for all our bills utilities, groceries, gas, childcare, etc. and was left with about 180 to put into savings and 100 for unforeseen expenses at the end of the month. The past month or two, however, weve barely been able to keep our heads above water. We recieve state assistance for child care we pay 250month and our daughters daycare as I believe is common with daycares charges even for the days she isnt there or theyre closed. This wouldnt be a big deal except for the fact that the state doesnt cover these days. This means an extra 50 for every day that shes out. Since starting daycare in April, theyve been closed for 2 holidays and shes caught 3 different bugs from the other kids there causing her to miss several days each time which means we owe her daycare 300. Add this to the fact that my hours at work have been unpredictable lately I can usually count on 22-29 hoursweek but there have been several weeks this month where Ive only gotten 8 hours. Were still recovering from the 500 we had to pay out of pocket for childcare before the state assistance was approved as well as a surprise and I do mean surprise 500 bill that drained our savings a few months ago. Ive made cutbacks everywhere I can think of no extra spending, no money into savings, less spent on groceries and were still barely scraping by. Any advice on how to dig ourselves out of this hole? TL;DR Wrote up what I think is a well-planned budget that will allow us to put money away for a house one day but we keep getting hit with unexpected expenses and despite making cutbacks in every area I can think of, were just barely scraping by and at this rate, our savings account will remain empty for a very long time.  <response>: It is perfectly reasonable to not save any money, or even to go into debt while youre going to college. That is, if you have a reasonable expectation of your degree increasing your income after college.Its great that youre thinking about this now, but dont stress about it yet. Get through college. If you do well and have real careers after, 150 a month of savings will have amounted to almost nothing compared to what youre able to do. If your career plans dont work out, your couple thousand dollars worth of savings from college wont be nearly enough to put you in a house.With that said, its an excellent idea to try to keep living within your means and build some cash reserves for a rainy day. 