Money. It’s a resource that holds an insurmountable amount of power. With it, life feels full of possibilities— parties you can Uber to, clothes you can ship right to your mail room and meals you can buy that taste a lot better than what local dining hall provides. By successfully budgeting, you allow yourself to feel like you own your money rather than your money owning you. Make budgeting a habit now and watch as it becomes a ritual that lets you enjoy the best things in life.
Read on for how budgeting can make your life on campus better while keeping your pockets full:
How to Create a Budget
A) Establish what your income is
When it comes to money, honesty is the best policy. When setting out to put your budget together, think critically about what your funds look like. Account for things like scholarships, work and support from your family. With this information in mind, you can figure out what you feel comfortable spending and what you want to set aside and save. Having a realistic idea of the resources that you can work with makes it easier to navigate budgeting.
B) Figure out what your expenses look like
On campuses full of thousands of students, no two students’ monthly expenses look the same. For some people there’s rent, for others there’s tuition every semester – and of course the select few that struggle with an online shopping addiction that gets fulfilled by tapping through Amazon. All these costs matter. Just lay them all out on the table, in an app, or within a spreadsheet so you can create a budget that best suits your wants and needs.
C) Evaluate the importance of your expenses
Making a budget based on percentages rather than set amounts allows for flexibility and lets you still utilize what you create regardless of what your money looks like. To do so, you must rank the different categories of items that you spend money on. Some of these categories like food, rent and transportation fall into the essential box that help you survive, while others make surviving exciting. By establishing the different levels of importance of these expenses, your budget can accurately reflect your priorities.
D) Calculate the Difference
Once you figure out the logistics of the money you have coming in and out, you will know approximately how much money gets saved. Setting money aside helps the budgeting process. It leaves room for both the unknown and known circumstances that exist beyond your knowledge. The extra textbook that you can’t find anywhere online, the formal dress that you absolutely need to buy at full price, the extra guacamole on a Thursday afternoon for lunch. All these expenses will be well within your reach after completing these calculations.
E) Set Goals
With this new system in place, you can now imagine a financial future that goes beyond your day-to-day expenses. A growing savings account opens the door to a landscape of possibilities. Including loans, you can plan to pay off, important people in your life that you can support, trips you can schedule and sentimental items you can buy. Setting goals allow you to move with intention and make choices that will set you up for fiscal success that stays with you long after you earn your degree.
F) Make Yourself Open to Adjustments
Even with all of your planning, financial changes may still happen within your life. Your rent might go up, the parties that you go to might start charging tickets and you might earn a scholarship. With all of these possibilities in mind, know that you can update the parameters of your budget whenever you need. Don’t look at your budget like some iron-clad contract, instead, view it as something that you can change whenever you want. Keeping your budget accurate to your current situation makes it a tool that’s as helpful as possible.
G) Cement it as a habit
Now you posses a budget. A living and breathing system built to make your life better, so utilize it as much as possible. This doesn’t mean that you need to become obsessed with your finances or drive yourself crazy with all the specifics of what you laid out. On the contrary, you should now feel free within the space that you created for yourself to try new things and learn more and more about how the money in your life can make it better.
An Example of a Budget Breakdown
With every student comes a unique financial situation. Because of this, no one budget fits every specific person’s needs. That being said, compartmentalizing serves as a universal tactic that helps students separate their needs from their wants and budget accordingly. Generally, experts recommend that creating a hierarchy of expenses and create limits based off of that. This example budget could be updated to fit anybody’s needs:
20%— Rent
20%— Food
20%— Savings
15%— Transportation
15%— Miscellaneous Shopping
10%— Entertainment
Tips on How to Stick to a Budget
A) Organize it in a way that works for you
Don’t stress yourself out by trying to remember all of the specifics that you set up, instead let technology help you out. Apps like Mint, Buddy and NerdWallet contain software that sort through your information. By downloading an app, you can track your spending from your back pocket. If you want something a little more concrete, set up an excel spreadsheet. In Microsoft, dozens of templates are available for free download. Taking the time to organize your budget makes it ten times easier to commit to it, so take the time to figure out what works for you.
B) Have a healthy mindset about budgeting
Handling your finances can feel like a big responsibility. One of the hardest parts of growing up is learning more about how you personally want to handle important matters, especially when their impacts feel so major. Give yourself the time to learn more about budgeting and how it can best serve you and your wishes. It’s okay to have slip ups on certain days, weeks or years! Just remember that the “right way” to budget does not exist and that creating a plan that you can live with and enjoy matters the most.
Three Example Budgets From Students
“I prioritize experiences, so eating out I only try to do on the weekends and for occasions,” University of Arizona graduate Zika Jenkins said. “Working a part time job throughout college was a great decision and very do-able for me.”
“I try to save everything that I get,” George Washington University first year student Matina Naum said. “Every so often I go out and buy new things, but it’s few and far between so I don’t worry about spending that much.”
“The most important thing to focus on while budging in college is looking at your budget at the beginning of each month so you can see what you can say yes to and what you might have to either say no to or work more hours, pick up another shift, etc. in order to make more to allocate for an extra expense,” King’s College senior and TikTok content creator Sydney Brown (@sydneygbrown) said.
Advice From an Expert
“Everybody should have a budget, whether they live on campus or not,” Spelman College Financial Aid Officer Helena Kindred said. “If you just add up all of the activities that you do and the items that you invest in and keep track of that, you suddenly have a much better understanding of your personal finances and that leads to a less stressful life.”
