It is a fact of college life that the majority of students are going to be low on dough, most of the time they are there.
Winning financial compensation awards is what someone like CKFLaw.com does on a daily basis and you might need their services at some point, but in the meantime, if you are trying to get through college life on a shoestring budget, here are some useful money management tips.
Creating a spending plan
As a college student, you have a career path to follow ahead of you and to be able to pursue your dreams and make it in your chosen profession or industry, you want to be able to concentrate on your education.
To be able to do this, you need to create a spending plan that accounts for all of your fixed and variable costs during your time at college.
Living away from home for the first time is a new experience in many ways, including learning how to handle your finances and manage your money with a degree of efficiency. If you can achieve this aim, you will hopefully avoid the worry that debt and financial difficulties can potentially spoil your concentration on those important academic studies.
Adding it all up
You need to create a budget that details all of your income and all of your expenditure, so that you can see in front of you, exactly where you stand financially.
Start off by listing all of your sources of income. This will comprise of not just the student loans, grants or other forms of financial aid that you might be entitled to, but also any income you derive from a part-time job and funds you are getting from parents while you are at college.
The next task is to collate a list of all of your fixed costs. Room and board fees, tuition costs, cell phone monthly tariff and any other regular monthly payments you make, need to be recorded.
Once you have a figure for your fixed monthly costs, you can then deduct this amount from your income figure, so that you have a number left, that represents the potential amount of disposable income you have available to you.
Every dollar counts
A typical scenario where a college student can run out of cash is not just because they are spending more than they have available , but also because they don’t record every amount that they spend.
Every cup of coffee or trip to the bar needs to be accounted for, as even small amounts of spending can soon add up to a big number. After a couple of weeks of putting all of these figures down, you should get a clear picture of where you stand with your spending.
Working to a budget throughout your time at college will help you to keep on top of your spending and rein in where necessary, rather than putting it all on a credit card, and ending up with a worrying bill that you then struggle to pay.
Learning how to financially savvy at college will set you up for later life, and is a good habit to get into.
Danielle Parry has been teaching her eldest son how to manage his money, recently having waved him off to college. She writes about parenting issues and college advice articles which you’ll find around the internet.
