A balanced budget
The reason they call it a bank balance is because it’s a question of getting the scales to tip the right way.
- Making a budget
- A sample budget
- Priorities
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- Ideally, what comes in is heavier than what goes out (unless it’s paper coming in, copper going out – but you get the idea). As a student, unfortunately, your expenditure almost invariably squats heavily at one end of the scales, as your income is lightly perched at the other. It’s like pitting a stick insect against a walrus.
This is not, however, any reason to give up. Indeed, it’s all the more reason to put the walrus on a diet and force feed the stick insect Crispy Cremes.
The two keys to student survival are
planning and
prioritising.
Know what you have to spend – even if it’s borrowed. Know what your spending priorities are. Maximise what comes in. Minimise what goes out. And be extremely pessimistic about both.
To do this, you need to work out how much you can afford to spend on any one thing and then stick to it. Or if it’s not possible, either make cutbacks elsewhere or somehow get hold of more money.
However, you can’t do this unless you plan. You can’t know what you can afford until you’ve worked out what you’ve got. And you can’t make cutbacks until you know the figure you’re cutting.
It’s all just a matter of balancing the books – a tedious business at first, but once you’ve done it, the whole being a student thing seems a lot less like living under a rock covered in mould. You can start to enjoy it – student life that is, not balancing the books.
Feeling secure and confident about your finances will boost your overall morale and help your studies (no, really). Although you’re unlikely to ever be rich while you’re a student, so long as you can make ends meet, you’ll have a much more relaxed and stress-free existence.
And just because you’re not overdrawn up to your neck, it doesn’t mean you’re not in trouble. You may have costs lurking round the corner like a man in a mac. Planning helps you see round the corners - and avoid said flasher.
If the whole lolly layout goes doolally, you need to know quickly, before it has a seriously detrimental affect on your studies and your health – which it will if you’re not able to seek help before it gets too serious. There’s nearly always a straightforward solution to every problem, if it is dealt with in time, so don’t just ignore it and hope it’ll go away. (
See 30 steps to solvency).
Last updated on: 09 April 2009