Financial Adaptation Practices Among International Students in Bandung, Indonesia: An Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis

International students entering a foreign economic environment must negotiate unfamiliar currencies, prices, payment systems, and peer consumption norms while maintaining academic routines. Existing student-finance research commonly emphasizes financial literacy, financial stress, budgeting, or digital-payment adoption as separate variables, leaving the lived process of everyday financial adaptation comparatively underexplored. This study employed an interpretivist-constructivist study designed to explore how international students at Politeknik Piksi Ganesha in Bandung, Indonesia, make sense of and adapt to everyday financial demands in the host environment. The study uses Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA). The bounded cohort comprises 13 eligible international students (12 Filipino, 1 Somali). Data will be generated through semi-structured individual interviews, followed by idiographic, case-by-case IPA and cross-case synthesis. Berry's acculturation framework, Ward and Kus' socio-cultural adaptation distinction, Lazarus and Folkman's Transactional Model of Stress and Coping, and Bandura's Social Learning Theory are treated as post-analytic sensitizing lenses rather than a priori coding frames. The study aims to provide an empirically grounded account of financial adaptation as a lived, relational, and context-dependent process, with implications for international-student orientation, peer support, and institutional financial guidance.