Affording and Saving for Grad School

[austinswan]

Hello,

Hopefully this is the right place for this topic.

I am interested in saving up graduate school in order to receive my DNP in Psychiatric Mental Health. I was wondering if anyone knew how much money I should save in order to live comfortably while attending school.

I had a teacher tell me to save around 30% of my income for at least three years before attending grad school.

I know a lot of different factors play into this situation. So to help anyone's advice:

1) I will be living in Austin, Texas

2) My starting RN-BSN Salary is around $50,000

3) I have no loans or debt

4) UT Austin is the school I would like to attend. The tuition for a full time student is near $5,000 a semester http://www.utexas.edu/business/accounting/pubs/tf_grad_fall13.pdf

5) The school states they will allow full time students to work part time only.

If anyone has any advice or an amount they found that worked well with or without loans, then that would be helpful.