As a college student, you might feel like avoiding a budget or even plan one, but this is where you’re going wrong. Picking up the habit of making a student budget planner is a valuable skill that can ease things out for you in the future.
You might not have a lot of income or expenditure to track now, nonetheless, a budgeting procedure requires you to be aware of a few fundamentals. In this article we’re going to look at a few points that you need to know about making your own budget.
Make An Estimate Of Your Monthly Expenses
This is the first step towards any kind of planning. This is synonymous to knowing your ground or where you stand at the moment. Before you judge your expenses accurately, you can never move on to the next steps of building a budget.
To start making an estimate of your expenses, you need to bear in mind that college expenses and personal expenses vary from person to person. So, an individual summary statement of your expenses is required.
Depending on your school, programs, accommodation, and extracurricular, you can start jotting down the potential expenses of each category. The broader topics of expenses to include in your list are as follows:
- Food
- Entertainment
- Clothing
- Rent
- Transportation
- Utilities
- Supplies (such as books and so on)
Now, under each broad topic, make subtopics and try to make your budget as precise as possible. For example, under the “Food” section, you can add subheads like eating out, groceries, and so on. Once you have this estimate ready, you’ll find avenues where you can save money.
Find Out Your Monthly Income
The next thing your student budget planner needs to include is your monthly income. The word might sound misleading as most college students don’t have a stable income.
While survey reports show that around 70% of students work while they’re enrolled in school, it’s also important to note that these are mostly part-time jobs to meet other expenses or summer internships to make extra savings.
Whatever it is, in your budget planner be as specific as possible. If you get financial aid from parents, be sure to know if it’s a steady amount or only for emergencies.
If you have student loans, the process can be trickier. You can use student loans for living expenses but you tend to forget that no one’s giving away that money to you. So if it’s a loan, you’ll have to repay it with interest. The best thing is to be smart about your loans. This’ll simplify your budgeting process in the future.
What to do if one doesn’t have a stable income? Some people rely on savings and so on. In that case, you can fill the income section by dividing your total savings by the required number of months.
Budgeting is not deliberately limiting yourself. It’s a smart way to keep a track of things. So, by the end of each month, you would want your income and expenses to match up. If that’s not happening, you’ll have a lot of info in your budget planner to find ways to save up.
Keep A Track On Your Expenditure
Once you have your expense and income estimates ready, you can start keeping a track on your expenditure. This is an important habit as you’ll need this long after you’re done with college. You can check out a few budgeting apps to help you initially.
As a college student, your planner might include semi-regular expenses like rent that you pay at the beginning of each month. Knowing how to manage these semi-regular expenses is a standard budgeting exercise required later in life as well for insurance, registration and so on. You can subtract these expenses from your monthly income at the start and use the difference amount as your main income from which you’ll track other expenses.
Don’t get discouraged by the process. It’s not that tedious as it sounds. Keep up the habit, make a few lifestyle changes and you’ll be good to go.
Set Some Money Aside
You’re budgeting for a reason. You have some set goals that you need to achieve for which budgeting can help. So, always remember to set aside a part of your money. You can allocate this money under ‘Savings’ or ‘Emergency’ in the expense section.
This money is not for spending. To make this possible, you can put it in a saving account. If you continue with this practice, you’ll be able to save up a lot without much effort. Once you have quite a lot, you can use it to fulfil your short-term goals or use it for any unforeseen emergency. You can even use it to travel or study a semester abroad or even pay off your student loans early.
College Budget Templates
A student budget planner generally includes spaces to fill in your flexible and fixed (like rent, accommodation, and course fees) expenses and a separate area to input your income. They provide a total of both your income and expense, so, it becomes easier for you to compare the two. Use a spreadsheet to create your own budget planner online. There are also online platforms that create budgeting planners for free. One such popular destination is ‘Mint’. There are multiple paid options as well if you want advanced budget planners.
Additional Budgeting Tips For Students
Here, we’ve listed a few more tips that can help you increase your income, reduce avoidable expenses and save smartly.
- Beware of student loans or buying things using a credit card
- Instead of buying new books, you can go for rented ones or even buy used, second-hand books to save up.
- Make the maximum use of your student discount using your Student ID in places where they give out discounts for that.
- Search for freebies or giveaways. There are many online platforms where people give away stuff. These may help you get through college without a lot of expense.
- Become a rewards member for free at many places such as restaurants or movie theatres and so on. This way you can go for some entertainment and also redeem benefits later.
- Open a side gig like a small business and earn money.
- Look for no-cost resources provided by your school like free health-care, tutors, and emergency loans and so on.
Follow these tips to build a smart budgeting plan and let us know if you found these useful.