Budgeting for College Students – How Do You Create a Budget

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I prefer this article to start with some important questions that, how many students in our era bothering about creating a student budget? How many of them are aware about this good practice? Frankly speaking, 98% of the college students are not maintaining a budget or not having enough control over their money and expenses. Considering this fact this article “budgeting for college students” is relevant.

In this time, college students have everything, but no idea or skills on how to manage their money. Here, I am trying to help college students to create a good budget and thus develop good money habits in their life. Follow the 10 excellent tips below, to create and maintain a good budget during college.

Major reasons for making a budget for students

In simple words, creating a student budget give exact idea on inflow and outflow of the money. It will help to avoid unnecessary expenses. It also help to utilize the money for better purposes. Moreover this, life of a student get very good discipline on managing money and finances.

My recommendation is, those students have loan or debt, must create and maintain a good budget to get clear control over money and get rid of student debt or later, it would come as huge burden to them. Have a look at below point. If you want to know the budgeting tips for families, then here is a step by step guide to create budget for families.

So, Students, how do you create a budget?

  1. Do not forget to involve your family members when you creating your budget.
  2. A clear goal and time-frame is mandatory while creating college budget. It can be monthly, quarterly or semester base, that depends on you.
  3. You need to list all your income in one side (i.e. pocket money, earnings part time job, side hustles for students etc..) and expenses in the other side such as fixed expenses and variable expenses
  4. Planning for emergencies is a must in any budget. So ensure, you have some amount in your hand to meet unexpected requirements.
  5. Big ticket items and required savings to achieve that, needs to be taken care of.
  6. Ensure your budget should give you balances in your hand at the end. This is your savings that can utilize in a better way later.
  7. Need to track each of your spending and revisit the necessary areas in the budget to make necessary adjustments.
  8. Also, revisit your budget whenever all your income and expenses part changes.
  9. Adding a miscellaneous category in your budget would help you to allocate some extra money for unexpected needs such as social outing, eating out extra etc.
  10. More importantly, always stick with your budget as planned, and ensure you are clearly following the budget.

Conclusion

Budgeting is necessary to take control over your money by reducing unnecessary expenses and save maximum. Above 10 points are easy to follow without any difficulties. Major benefits of having a budget is, your life get good discipline by understand the value of money. It also help to distinguish between what is needs and what is wants. Have it as a practice and it will follow you throughout your life.

Best wishes.