Learning to budget properly at uni can be a difficult thing to do. But if you do know how to do it properly, it can make managing spending a lot easier and less stressful. So here are my tips on how to create a budget:
Do a budget every term
For uni budgeting, its just a lot easier to make a budget at the start of each term. Before you start, check the term dates for your uni to see how far this budget needs to stretch.
Also make sure you include uni/ ‘school’ holidays in your termly budget, I made this mistake my first term and realised that I hadn’t included the Christmas holidays (mainly for rent) so by January, I had a lot less in my account that I thought I would.
Start by listing your money coming in
This might be student loans, a bursary, job money or money from family but list it all, when its coming in and how much. Then add this all up to give you your term money.
Next list all your outgoings
This is all your outgoing payments such as:
- Rent
- Bills if they’re not included
- Insurance (if you have a car)
- Road Tax (if you have a car)
- Subscriptions
- Phone bills
- I even include my haircuts with roughly the number of them that I’ll need in a term
- Bus Pass
I don’t include my weekly stuff such as food in this, that part comes after.
Times all of these by the number of months/ times you’ll need to pay them in a term (might not line up perfectly with term dates but should work well enough) and subtract them one by one from your term money.
Weekly spending amount
You should now have a value written down of your term money minus all your monthly/ not weekly outgoings. Divide this number by the number of weeks that your budget is for. This number is your weekly spending amount. You can further split this into money for food and money just to spend on whatever you want but that’s up to you.
Fuel pot
For people with disabilities (though this could be applied to anyone) travel costs can be quite expensive to get to uni, etc. For example, due to the lack of public transport in my uni area, I had to bring my car down at the end of my first term because it just became too much.
To manage these fuel costs (only if you have a car of course), it might be a good idea to create a separate ‘fuel pot’ which also needs to be included in your budget buts its just an set amount written down that you take out of when you need it to buy fuel. I did originally try to just include this in my weekly spending but found that difficult to manage as I wasn’t always getting it every week or it was more than I could afford in my weekly budget.
Separating money out into accounts
I’m not sure if you can do this with every bank as I’m just with Santander but I found it really helpful to open savings accounts (called everyday savers in my case) that you can just transfer money instantly between. They usually only need £1 in them for them to stay open. Currently I have one savings account that I put my rent money for the term in, one for any actual savings I have for extra bits I want and then one savings for the rest of my money to go into.
Then every week, I transfer my weekly budgeted amount into my current account for spending (you do also have to transfer any monthly payments into the current account when needed). Obviously this isn’t a necessity but its really helped me make sure I’m not spending over my weekly budget as I can physically see how much I have left.
Sometimes things do cost more than expected
Although you might have the perfect budget, there can sometimes be some unexpected costs that arise. This is okay and its bound to happen at some point, you just have to make sure its accounted for and the budget might have to be shifted around a bit. For these unexpected costs, it might be a good idea to budget in some ‘backup’ money to go into that actual savings account but that’s all completely up to you. Nevertheless, I hope this ‘how to create a budget’ was helpful!
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