Your priority is study, not money.
Yes, this website is all about managing your money in college. However, it’s true that your priority is not managing money, it’s studying your degree. The money management part is important, but it’s not something that is emphasised on in university. So you want to find a way to keep your finances in check without obsessing over them every second of the day.
Well, there is a way to control them efficiently and non time-consumingly. Learning how to do this will not only let you sleep better at night, but it’s great practice once you do actually enter the workforce and become an #adult. And trust me, that’s gold.
Here are some tactics to make sure the $$ won’t keep you up at night.
Spend one day sorting it all out
If you’re totally new to the whole ‘having your money in order’ shebang, it’s time to sort it out. Yes, it can be a little overwhelming: you need to put your budgeting systems in place, calculate your expenses and manage the income; aka make a budget.
Set aside one day in your schedule for this week to properly go through your money outflows and inflows and create the first version of your budget. Honestly, if you follow the student guide to budgeting, it shouldn’t take longer than an hour and a half. All you need is paper, a pen, and your bank records if you don’t know your expenses.
Keep procrastinating it? Make it into a little adventure. Go to a new coffee shop and order a fancy coffee as you work on the numbers. Or try the library. All you need is a couple of hours to fully focus on your finance plan. And once it’s done, it’s done. You only need to redo it if you want to.
Put everything on autopilot
You’ve got your budget ready and a plan for the spending/investing/goal achieving. The next step is to put it all on autopilot so you don’t have to worry about manually moving the money every time.
Direct debits: If you followed the budgeting guide and are allocating 15% to personal goals, set up a direct debit so your 15% immediately leaves your bank account the minute you get your income. Once that 15% is gone, you can literally do what you want with the rest of the money, the saving has been done.
Apps: Apps are a great way to keep track of expenses and make sure your budgeting system is working correctly. Here are some I’d recommend
Revolut: Like a separate bank app - tracks every one of your expenses and a nice little bonus of easily exchanging currencies
Chip: Automatically does random savings for you
Money Dashboard: Easy to calculate net worth and see your overall financial picture
You’ll find more snazzy tools over at Apps & Software
Batch problem-solving
One of the things that keeps students (and adults) up at night are when specific problems arise: the student loan company has an issue with your payment, the bank detected an unusual payment, your dad needs to see what you’re spending your money on.
These problems are time consuming, annoying and will just make you worry. When you see a few of them on the horizon, aim to fix them all at once. You can allocate an afternoon to calling the SLC, going all the way to the bank and having a phone call with your dad. Do all the painful and boring stuff in one go and then forget about it. If it was especially painful, treat yourself to a beer/cocktail/chocolate - next time might not be so bad.
I literally allocate one hour a day to admin, or ‘shallow work’ as Cal Newport likes to call it. Emails, calls, letters, all done in one hour. Then I never check email again till the next day. It seriously works wonders.
Once a month - spend an afternoon adding it all up
Your money system is in place and you’ve got it running on autopilot (#adulting). Great! But you will still need to keep an eye on it and adjust it every now and then. Getting the system exactly how you want it takes time and practice. The first month you set your budget way too low so you’ll need to adjust it in the second one. The next month your income fluctuates and you need to sacrifice a bit of your 15%. The month after that you win the lottery and wow that’s a lot of money (it could happen…).
What I’m saying is that every month you want to spend at least one hour looking over your budget, checking how you did last month and readjusting for the next one. You could get an Excel spreadsheet and have it organised so you can compare month to month. It would take max half an hour to slot in the numbers and see how you can improve for next month. Add in some motivation by calculating how long before your 15% reaches your goals.
And if you keep procrastinating it, same as last time: make it into a little adventure. I’ve heard of couples who meet every month to do a ‘budget party’. There’s wine, good food and relaxing music - then out comes the budget and they start analysing how the month did and where their goals are going. Sounds pretty amazing to me.
These lil tactics are important to not let money management interfere with your studies. One afternoon to put the plan in place and set it on autopilot, one afternoon to solve problems and one hour a month to review and improve. Pretty good huh? And the more you do it, the better you get at it. Next thing you’ll have a job and have to manage way more money and money issues. But guess what? You’ll be prepared - thanks to the budget party.
