Meal plan or no meal plan..plus can someone explain garnet bucks compared to flex bucks?

Pasbal
Fri, 12 Jun 2015 04:28:18 +0000

So for whatever reason I still get Seminole Dining’s emails (thought I unsubscribed years ago). I got their email today laying out the new plans…

I forgot that to be able to use meal plans at places on campus to substitute for the dining halls (and it’s only 8 different places- if your kid likes Miso in the Union (sushi!), they’re out of luck there!) it’s an additional $100 a semester. Wow.

Yeah, my advice would be to buy even just a couple hundred bucks of Garnet Bucks at the start of the semester. Just make sure that your kids know that they are stored on the FSU ID card and they will probably have to say Garnet Bucks not FlexBucks at places or else they’ll probably get told the balance is $0 if they don’t have a meal plan.

Alternatively, and of course this comes with some difficulties in tracking your kid’s usage of funds for money and money alone, you could give them a reloadable credit card that you put money on whenever your kid needs it. You could also just put money in their bank account and they could use their card that way, and not have to juggle whether their food card has money on it or not vs. their bank account.

The first semester you and your kids will really be finding out how much they like the food on campus. The down side is that Garnet Bucks are only usable on campus, so if your kid likes the restaurants around campus they won’t be able to go out without spending other funds. Of course though Garnet Bucks are a MUCH better idea than a meal plan unless for some reason your kid is eating enough to justify one of them.

The unlimited meal plan is $1999 per semester. Add in the VIP package and it’s $2098. Your kid’s only going to be on campus a little under 4 months (I believe the FSU standard is 115 days). At $2098, that’s $524.50 a month for 4 months. This past year I ate out almost every night and didn’t spend $524.50 a month on food. I usually spent somewhere around $90-100 a week.