Just months after hanging up her mortarboard and hitting the job market, Boston University graduate Lindsay Holst has teamed up with three other students from Boston-area colleges to assemble Broke in Boston, a guidebook on how to live cheap and find the best deals at bars, restaurants and clubs in the city.
“We took to writing something that pointed out the hidden spots, the hidden gems,” Holst, a 2006 College of Communication graduate and former Daily Free Press reporter, said.
“Typically, you only acquire knowledge of these places after living in the city for a couple of years. After a while, you kind of want to impart that knowledge on others.
“The book is a guide to living cheaply in the city,” she continued. “It’s aimed at anyone who’s on a tight budget, anyone who wants to go out and enjoy the city. I certainly would have appreciated something like this when I was a freshman.”
Andrew Einhorn, 27, spent two years living in Brookline and Brighton after graduating from Emory University in Atlanta, Ga. While living in the city on a tight budget, he searched unsuccessfully for an updated book to give him some guidance.
While completing his graduate degree in Washington, D.C., Einhorn hired one student from four colleges — Holst from BU, Kevin Collins from Boston College, Joelle Hobeika from Harvard University and Rebecca Dreilinger from Brandeis University.
“I tried to get local expertise working on the project so that the small, grittier places that have the great deals would be put on the book,” Einhorn said. “There are places in there that list where to take guests or your parents when they come to town, good date places, free entertainment and all the cultural things that happen in the city.”
According to the authors, Broke in Boston is aimed at anyone living in Boston with a small budget, not only undergraduate students.
“It works as a guide for saving money and a guide for Boston,” Einhorn said. “Even if you live in Boston, that doesn’t mean that you can’t be a tourist to the city. A lot of people don’t take advantage of everything the city has to offer because they live there, and they take it for granted.”
While Holst explored BU’s surrounding areas, Kevin Collins covered Boston College.
“If I wouldn’t take my friends there, then I wasn’t going to write about it,” Collins said in an email. “My basic rule was that if I couldn’t have fun there, then why would I want to tell someone else that maybe they should try their luck?”
Collins, who said he did not take advantage of the city until his junior year, emphasized the importance of being adventurous.
“There’s too much to do and see in Boston to stick so rigidly to your routine,” he said. “In college, you can fall into a pattern and your weekends can become predictable.”
Collins had to work harder to convince his peers to wander off campus and away from BC’s football team during the autumn months.
“There’s always something going on at BC, especially during football season,” Collins said. “It’s easy to be lazy and to just stay on campus.”
Collins said one of the most difficult parts of living in Boston was writing a monthly rent check.
“Housing is the biggest headache, because students are charged huge sums for less-than-average apartments,” he said. “It can be a real drag when you’re paying $800 a month only to have your ceiling leak whenever it rained.”
Expensive housing was one reason Einhorn created the book, which includes apartment-hunting tips and other guidelines on how to survive first rental experiences.
“Boston is the third-most expensive city to live in in the country,” he said. “The rental rates are ridiculous. And, because Boston has so many schools and so many students and everyone is competing for the same job, employers can take advantage of people.”
Collins recommended sticking to a budget and having a sense of humor.
“If you’ve got a sense of humor, you can get through anything — from money woes to girlfriend/boyfriend troubles,” Collins said. “I think Conan O’Brien said it best to the graduating class of 2000 at Harvard: ‘If you can laugh at yourself loud and hard every time you fall, people will think you’re drunk.'”