4 Money Management Tips For College Students
College is a great time to learn how to manage your finances and build habits that will help set the stage for financial success for the rest of your life. We gathered tips from both financial experts and college students like you. Take a look at these 4 quick tips for mastering money management.
Track Your Expenses
The easiest way to stay on top of your finances is to track where your money is going. Regularly take a look at what you’ve been spending your money on and see where you can make cuts or spend more effectively. You might not realize how much your small, daily purchases add up to until you take a look at your income and expenses.
Creating a budget is one thing; sticking to it can be more complicated. The next step is to track your expenses through an app (there are many on the internet) on your phone, or even on paper, to determine if they match with your real-world experience or require fine-tuning.
Tracking expenses by date is also key. For example, if you’ve budgeted Rs 5000 for your monthly food budget but use it up in two weeks, you know you’ll need to make adjustments.
Cook On A Budget
A food budget is a fact of life for adults. No matter who you are, you gotta eat and eat regularly. But there are also many different ways to go about feeding yourself and the decisions you make have a huge impact on your bottom line.
Learning how to cook on a budget is an art and a skill that you can rely on for the rest of your life. Finding out how to make foods you like to eat that don’t break the bank is a balancing act that can also be a fun experience at the same time.
If you put a few simple, delicious dinner recipes in your cooking arsenal, you’ll find it much easier to save money in the future by pulling together a low-cost meal at home instead of relying on expensive take-out or unhealthy fast food for a quick bite at the end of the day.
Resist Peer Pressure
You should classify all your expenses into expenses on necessities and expenses on luxuries. The necessary expenses have to be incurred in any case but the luxury expenses can be deferred depending on your cash position.
A lot of spending nowadays is happening because of peer pressure. Most people are buying phones, phone accessories, gaming tools not because they need them but because all their friends have them.
It is very important for students living on a fixed low budget to resist such peer pressure which will help them save out on a lot of cash.
Make Investments On Yourself
The Investments that yield the maximum returns are not the investments that you make on others but the investments that you make on yourself.
Making Investments in yourself basically refers to taking a soft skills course, or a Course on Improving your Presentation Skills, or attending some seminar or conference. These investments may not give instant returns but will help you get better salary pay packages and more clients for your own start-up.
