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A tiny windfall is pretty easy to spend. If you find $10 or $20 on the street, you can just use it to help pay for groceries or some other regular expense to give yourself just a bit of breathing room in your budget.

A huge windfall – like an inheritance or a legal settlement – can be easy, too. Use it for a huge life purchase, like a house, or stick it somewhere and live off the interest.

The difficulty comes with those windfalls that are somewhere in between. What do you do if you come up with a bonus that’s more than a paycheck, but not approaching a year’s salary?

It’s a question I often get from readers and versions of it pop up with some regularity in the Reader Mailbag. What can I do with a medium-sized windfall – say, $1,000 or so – that actually makes good long-term sense?

Keep things simple but delicious and you’ll host an affordable, memorable Thanksgiving feast. Photo: vxla

You may have recently mastered the art of budget-conscious grocery shopping, but preparing for Thanksgiving dinner is a whole other ballgame. Carving off some savings will take a lot more time and effort, since each dish typically requires its own set of ingredients, some which are a bit pricey.

Before you check your bank account and automatically fall into panic mode, breathe and take the following steps:

When I was a college student, I lived for about a year with a few other people in a shared apartment. None of us had much money at all, so we basically packed as many people in there as we could get away with to make the rent cheap.

For me, that meant that the only times I was really at home was to eat, to bathe, and to sleep (with maybe a few late-night conversations with my roommates thrown in here or there). I mostly hung out at the library on campus, went to classes, went to my job, and went to a lot of student organization meetings (they were great – I got to meet a lot of people and they often had free food).

My diet was really simple. I’d usually eat oatmeal or generic cereal for breakfast almost every morning, a sack lunch with a sandwich and a few vegetables for lunch, and ramen with some sort of cheap protein tossed in (usually cooked chicken breast) for dinner almost every night.

Volunteering over winter break is a great way to make a difference in your community – and build your resume, too. Photo: Wonderlane

It’s hard to believe how fast the fall semester has gone by, but winter break is rapidly approaching for many college students. And while it’s perfectly acceptable to take time to enjoy the company of family, unwind after a rough semester, and catch up with friends from home, you can do all that and something productive all at the same time.

In fact, here are 18 productive things you can do over your winter break that can help your finances or improve your job prospects after graduation.