The DAAD stipend sounds like a lot of money when you convert it to pesos for the first time. It is not a lot of money once you’ve paid Dresden rent, semester contribution fees, health insurance, and a monthly transit pass, and what’s left has to stretch across groceries, phone bill, and the inevitable emergencies that show up in a new country.

My first month, I did the math wrong in the most predictable way — I budgeted like the whole stipend was spending money, forgetting that rent gets deducted before anything fun happens. By week three I was eating the same lentil soup four nights running and quietly panicking. It took an embarrassingly long time to build an actual monthly budget, split into fixed costs (rent, insurance, transit, phone) and flexible costs (food, incidentals, the occasional train ticket to see something outside Dresden), and to track it honestly instead of just hoping it would work out.

A few things that actually moved the needle for me: cooking in batches instead of per meal, because the marginal cost of a second and third portion is so much lower than a whole separate meal; buying a semester transit pass instead of individual tickets, even though the upfront cost stung; and treating the university’s international student office as a genuine resource — they knew about discounted meal plans and used-furniture exchanges that weren’t advertised anywhere else.

I also had to get comfortable saying no to things, which was harder than the budgeting itself. Weekend trips with classmates, dinners out, spontaneous plans — I missed some of them, and I don’t regret it, because the alternative was running out of stipend before the month ran out of days. What I did instead was pick the things that mattered most to me — usually anything connected to actually seeing the country I was living in — and let the rest go without guilt.

If you’re about to start living on a stipend for the first time: build the budget before you land, not after the first confusing bank statement. And build in a small buffer for the month you get it wrong, because you probably will, at least once.