If you’ve ever turned on the television or y’know, gone outside in your life you’ll most likely be aware that one of the most common tropes regarding students is that we are sadly lacking a proverbial pot in which to piss. Society has generally painted the countries student population as a devious band of penniless, Dickensian gutter snipes, living off tins of cold Baked Beans and working as pharmaceutical guinea pigs for beer money.
As with so many things, this is partially exaggerated, in fact you may find early on that you actually feel the opposite is true. With your post loan bank balance at an all-time high and believing as I did that any number higher than £1000 was infinite. Naturally, this is not the case.
However, despite the countries current obsession with budget advice, money saving and Martin bloody Lewis, along with the consistent financial incompetence and arrant bloody stupidity of First Year University Students, most of the budgeting advice available seems rather bland and unhelpful.
So with that, here’s a few tips from me.
First things first, attempt to work out broadly how much you can afford to spend each week. Most online advice will tell you to spend time making painstaking accounts to track your spending, but I say, don’t spend half your first year trying to remember how to use Microsoft Excel, there’s a far simpler way to ensure you never go over.
Basically, walk down to your nearest cashpoint each Monday, take out your allotted weekly sum, put it in your wallet and proceed on with your life. All you have to do is only spend the cash in your wallet, if you go over, tough, wait until the following Monday. It’s the only way you’ll learn you crazy profligate fresher you, where do you think you are, Monte Carlo? If you can stay vigilant it’s a far simpler alternative to budgeting. A friend of mine from halls last year was able to keep a running total of exactly what he spent each day, but assuming you aren’t Russell Crowe from A Beautiful Mind, I would recommend this solution as far less difficult and time consuming .
Secondly, bearing in mind I may be removed by the University wetwork department for saying this. Try to avoid the campus supermarket. Costcutter is horrendously expensive, it just is, and it doesn’t take an Economist to see why. It’s close, convenient and Students are a profoundly lazy bunch. “Throatcutter” knows that most students are car-less and thus walking to another supermarket and lugging back a week’s shopping is a huge pain, so they charge you for the convenience of an un-separated shoulder, and it works. It’s oh so easy to get suckered into the Costcutter easy living racket, but don’t be fooled. By my reckoning the extra cost of food at Costcutter in comparison to a major supermarket was far and away the largest avoidable drain on my funds during First Year. Try and make the extra effort, at least occasionally. Ultimately, it’ll be worth it.
Finally, when you do buy, buy big. Bulk buying sounds like an obvious way to save money, but you’d be surprised how few first year students actually do it. For a student on a limited budget, the concept of doing a hundred pound shop sounds like it would make an enormous dent in their funds, but although spending such large sums may appear daunting, in the long run it will save you both time and money. Just try not to allow your vast stockpiles to cause you to consume more, which will not only erode the savings made from bulk buying, but will inevitably transform you into an enormous, fat drunk. Well, more of an enormous fat drunk than First year will transform you into anyway.
So that’s all my advice, I’m just going to finish off with a little hint on what you shouldn’t do to save money. You definitely shouldn’t go buy a hip flask, fill it up with alcohol before nights out and use it to get around extortionate nightclub drinks prices. I really can’t stress that enough; it would wholly inappropriate and potentially legally dubious for me to tell you to do that. Do you hear me? Good. Have fun.