Decreasing Expenses for College Students
BY DAVID GUTIERREZ
Being a college student is tough, especially from the financial standpoint. Even if you forget student loans that weigh down many people for years after, merely maintaining a decent lifestyle during college is hard when you cannot have a full-time job. Here are a few tips on how you can decrease your living expenses without sacrificing too much.
1. Budget Carefully
If you’ve never had to budget your money before, it is going to be hard. But you have to learn this art if you want your student loan to last long enough to get you to the end of your education. Make sure your spending is only limited to things you really need. Avoid impulse purchases. Have a certain limit on your spending and do your best not to exceed it. Get a personal finance app to make organizing your funds easier.
2. Buy a Used Car
A freshly manufactured car immediately loses about forty percent of its price after being sold the first time, which means that if you know your way around, you can get some pretty extreme bargains. However, buying used cars is an art in and of itself, and it is just easy to buy a piece of scrap that will fall apart the first time you sit behind the wheel. So, if you want to avoid nasty surprises, it pays to look through a few specialized resources prior to committing to anything.
3. Make Use of Student Discounts
Students get an enormous number of discounts on all things imaginable, from clothes and food to cinema and concert tickets. You could easily get an Amazon promo code online before you buy for instance. However, it doesn’t mean you should go on a spending spree just to enjoy your discounts while they last – on the contrary, they should serve as a topping to other wise spending habits. Only buy things you are really going to use, and look for retailers that make special offers for students.
4. Be Ready to Get Rid of Unnecessary Things
Many things can catch a top dollar on eBay, and used textbooks can be exchanged for a gift card at Amazon. Whenever you feel that a thing is just sitting around eighty percent of the time and you are unlikely to use it ever again, try to sell it to somebody who needs it more than you. It will simultaneously help you to raise some money and get rid of unnecessary stuff that does nothing but distract your from really important things.
5. Avoid Fast Food and Eating Out
Constant visits to McDonald’s and donut shops may not seem like a costly affair, but they do add up – not only to your waistline, but to your expenses as well. Cooking your own food is healthier, less expensive and much less time-consuming than trying to get rid of all these extra calories later on. Or, if you really hate cooking, use a college meal plan.
Cutting your expenses is much easier than it may seem. Human’s ability to invent new things to waste money on is unlimited – but it also means that you can safely eliminate more than half of your current
David Gutierrez has worked in the field of web design since 2005. Right now he started learning Java in order to get second occupation. His professional interests defined major topics of his articles. David writes about new web design software, recently discovered professional tricks and also monitors the latest updates of the web development
