All over the world, students are considered not the richest members of society. In general, student time is when you have a lot of energy and a lot of desires, but often there is not enough money to realize these desires. Of course, there are students from very rich families, but very typically even students from such families have problems with money, because their parents want to teach them to manage their own budget, and give them only a very limited amount of money for a month or a year. It is generally accepted that then, as they grow older, people learn to handle money, but in fact this is not so. The sooner children begin to understand how the exchange of labor for money, and then the exchange of money for goods and services, the easier it is for them to plan their financial future, spend money correctly, save money, and at the same time enjoy life. In this article, we will tell you a little about how to budget being a college student.
You Need to Know What You are Spending
You will find this advice in any book or article on the budget, but unfortunately, despite the fact that this is one of the popular tips and everyone knows about it, very few people really regularly and carefully record their expenses, and generally know how much money and what they spend on during the year. Even if you don’t follow any of the other tips in this article, we advise you to start writing down your expenses, and you will see for yourself where you can save and what you should start saving money for.
Take Control Over Good and Bad Expenses
There are so many ways to control expenses, there are many programs that allow you to do this, many of them even integrate with your card, and with your accounts, and can do it automatically, showing beautiful charts, building forecasts of your expenses based on previous information and collected in the previous period. But we advise you to turn to the good old way and write everything in an Excel spreadsheet, and in this way you will not depend on an external application, your data will always be secure, and you will always be able to customize the expense table for yourself. This is not the only way you can keep track of expenses, but the easiest way to find out, and a very good way to be able to analyze both expenses and income later.
What else can be considered a good expense, while we are at it? First of all, it is everything that helps you save time you can spend on something much more important or profitable, like a side job. You can pay someone to write your paper for you today with WriteMyPaperHub service, and have a few days of freedom before you need to think about academic writing again. Students worldwide address expert writing services for help in order to get things done. These are good expenditures that help you move forward with assignments instead of holding you back.
Don’t Believe in a Latte Nonsense
One of the most popular recent theories about budgeting, saving, and the future is that if you buy yourself a cup of latte every day at a coffee shop near your home, then if you multiply the amount of that latte by 365 days, you get a huge amount that you could not spend if you made coffee at home and took it with you. It is believed that if you start saving on this latte, then your financial stability will begin to grow fundamentally, and thus you will create the basis for your capital. There is nothing wrong and nothing wrong with saving on simple things that we do not need, but the latte theory is very simplistic. You need to look not at the expense of the latte, but in principle at the budget. If you have a budget for food and drinks out for this month, and you fit into it, then you are doing everything right. Pay attention to those items in your budget that often get out of hand. Even when it seems to you that you have already pledged a rather serious amount, and it is in these budget items that you first try to figure it out and change something. You will most likely free up and save much more money in this way than in several years of drunk latte.
First, Pay Yourself, Later, Pay for the Milk
One of the founders of the First pay yourself theory, Bodo Schaefer is considered one of the best personal finance experts of the last 40-50 years. Of course, many of his investment theories are already outdated, but the basic things remain unchanged. Of any money you receive, the first thing to do is to pay yourself. That is, first, set aside money for a rainy day and for some big purchase that you are collecting for. It could be a house, a car, or even a phone replacement. Once you’ve put those two pieces of money aside, you can budget for the rest of your purchases, including food, transportation, training, and the like. Keep track of what costs are the most in your plan. It could be bills that you have to pay anyway, and it could be wants, things you could get by with but keep buying because they make you feel better every single moment.
Find a Side Hustle, You Need it
More than 60 years ago in America, you could easily find a job right out of college. You didn’t have any student loans, and one job could feed not only you, but a family of three. Now the situation has changed, and finding a job after college is quite problematic if you do not have any work experience. So, it’s time to find yourself a side hustle that you can do while you’re in college. It can be quite difficult, and let it be the smallest job that does not take much time, but there will be some kind of cash income within a month, and the ability to fill out a resume with some work experience. When you start spending not the money of your parents and not the scholarship, but the money that you yourself have earned, then you will understand how much you yourself are interested in saving and in order to stop buying something unnecessary.
Keeping a budget is difficult, regardless of whether you are a student or a young professional with some work and life experience. We hope you find these tips helpful.