Is it possible to live on a budget while still at school?
There is a very high probability that students still depend on their parents for monthly allowance, whether regular or irregular.
So to manage monthly allowance properly, it is necessary to budget your allowance to make your monthly funds sustain you through the month, also curbing your excess spending at school.
Here are 5 ways to budget while at school
1. Create a list of all your expenses
To have an effective budget at school, the first step is to create a list of all the things you might possibly need while at school, which means all the items you would be spending money on.
List them all out, including your needs and wants. It would help you know how to plan your budget properly.
2. Know the difference between your needs and wants
You should always know the difference between your needs and wants and try to reflect it in your budget, especially when you really don't have enough to get you through.
Your needs are more important than your wants.
Needs are the important things to take you through a period and you can't do without them but wants are the things you really don't need but you desire to have.
Knowing the difference between needs and wants will help you plan your budget well because you know your needs are more important than your wants and you also know your needs comes first when creating a budget, and wants can come last if you have extra cash to spend on them.
3. Cut out unnecessary expenses
After listing out all your expenses, both the important and not so important expenses, you should cut out all the unnecessary expenses from the list.
This would be the hard part for most students but you need to cut out things you don't necessarily need in your expenses.
At school, there are so many distractions which can make you dip into your finance, making you spend money on irrelevant and unnecessary things which actually don't really add value.
To have a realistic working budget, you need to cut out unnecessary budget.
4. Leave space for miscellaneous
When creating your budget, make sure to leave a space for miscellaneous to be on the safe side.
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Adding miscellaneous to your budget helps your budget to have more flexibility, just in case you are missing something from your budget, helping you not to go over your budget.
5. Never omit savings from your budget
The main reason why budgets are created is to save more money and curbing our expenses, so savings should never be left out of a budget.
ALSO READ: How to create a bare-bones budget
Decide how much you want to put into your savings monthly and insert it into your budget as an expense.
Your savings can be used to cover other projects, enabling your monthly budget to work much better for you.