Student money management covers many areas of student personal finance. There are so many things to think about from student loans to saving money and trying to find ways to earn extra cash to help make ends meet whilst you study. We’ve got you covered below with plenty of student money management tips to make the most of your finances.
Student Money Management Tips
Student Loans
If you wish to attend higher education then you need to have plan in place to finance this. There’s no sugar coating it, education is expensive. The average college student graduates with over $30,000 in student loans. But good education has obvious benefits later in life like better jobs with higher salaries. For many this expense is worth it. Is college debt worth it in 2023? View the pros and cons.
But you should ensure you have a plan in place to finance this. Taking out a student loan can be daunting – you need to ensure the provider is trustworthy and offers good value.
Platforms like LendKey allow anybody to achieve their dreams of higher education. They partner with quality credit unions and community banks to offer private student loans with interest rates as low as 1.66%.
If you are currently studying or have graduated you may be able to shave thousands of dollars off the lifetime of your current loan simply by refinancing it.
Refinancing means moving your loan to a new provider at a lower rate of interest to save money. You may also be able to combine multiple loans into one single loan, making it easier to manage. LendKey makes it easy to refinance, see how much you could save on your student loan.
Making Your Money Last
Saving Money
There are lots of easy ways to save money as a student including;
- Cutting out non-essential spending
- Shop around for better deals on your bills
- Use credit cards with caution
- Don’t take out payday loans
- Switch to cheaper grocery brands
- Buy second hand goods
- Use cashback apps
- Collect and use loyalty points
- Register for student discounts
- Open a savings account
- Set up automatic savings
- Refinance student loans
- Take advantage of free trials and products
- Haggle on everything including rent
- Prep your own food
- Get money back on unused internet allowances
In addition to these student money management tips, we have a guide with more tips on how to save money at home that is applicable to everybody, including students. We will cover some of the most applicable ones below.
Budgeting
Setting up a budget is one of the most important student money management tips. It’s incredibly easy to set up a simple monthly budget with free apps. These let you keep track of all money coming in and going out of your account each month. By getting a good overview of your finances you can ensure you always have enough money in your account to cover your bills. This will avoid any overdraft fees or extra borrowing. You can also identify any unnecessary spending and cut those bills to save more money.
Student Discounts
One great thing about being a student is it often qualifies you for huge discounts on shopping not available to anybody else. Student Beans is one of the world’s leading student discount providers. Great discounts can be found across hundreds of leading brands like Apple, Samsung and McDonald’s. And it’s absolutely free to join. The only requirement is that you must be a student.
Register for free Student Beans discount
Cashback
Another thing you should be using when purchasing products is a cashback app. These pay you back a part of your total spend. The amounts you earn back usually varies between retailers.
Buy And Sell Your Textbooks
All those specialist textbooks required for your studies can be expensive if you purchase them directly. Save money by using sites like Textbooks.com. They specialize in new and used textbooks with up to 90% off.
Not only can you save money but you could also make money by selling them your old textbooks. They even buy back the books you buy from them. With some they guarantee to repurchase them for at least 50% of the purchase price.
Save money on your studies at Textbooks.com
Open A Savings Account
One of the best student money management tips we can give is to open a savings account. Then ensure you save as much spare cash as you can to build up an emergency fund.
Try to set up an automatic payment if you can to instantly transfer spare change to your savings account. This will help prevent any temptation to spend.
You can open an easy access high yield savings account online with as little as just $1. Digital banks usually offer much better rates of interest than the traditional banks.
Check out the best online savings accounts interest rates.
Making Extra Money
When it comes to student money management, it’s not just saving money you are looking for but ways to make extra money as well. There are lots of free ways to make extra income to help you through your studies.
What are the pros and cons of active vs passive income
Side Businesses For Students
A side business or side hustle refers to making money ‘on the side’. It doesn’t have to be a full time venture. There are many ideal side businesses suited to students such as freelancing. A freelancer can work on an ad-hoc basis and make money selling a skill.
Popular freelance work includes content writing, copy-writing, web design, tutoring and more. Pretty much any skill set you have you can be sure to sell it on a freelancing website.
Freelancing isn’t just limited to digital skills, physical skills are still in demand. Apps like TaskRabbit allow you to find small tasks and projects in your local area. Digital projects can be found on here but it does skew more towards offline jobs. This could include tasks such as cleaning, gardening, shopping, handyman services, event staff, deliveries and much more.
Learn more about side businesses for students.
Investments
One of the best ways to grow your money is to invest it. This option may not be for everyone, especially if money is already tight. But for anybody that has managed to save some extra cash you could be putting it to work for you.
An investment is purchasing a financial asset with the expectation of providing future growth of your money. There are many types of investment. From traditional assets most are relatively familiar with like stocks and bonds. To higher risk alternative assets like cryptocurrency.
It is a common misconception that you require a lot of money in order to invest. But this is not the case. There are financial providers like Acorns that offer micro-investing services. This is where very small sums of money are rounded up and invested (usually $1 or less). The downside to this is that there are usually account management fees for using these apps.
Another option is to use commission free trading apps like Public to purchase stocks, funds and crypto. They allow fractional share dealing. This is handy if you don’t have a lot of funds. Fractional ownership just means you buy less than one whole share – just a fraction of it. There are no trading or account management fees so it doesn’t cost anything to buy, sell or hold your investments.
Passive Income Apps
There are some handy free ways to make a few extra dollars from passive income apps. They won’t produce big returns but will give you a bit of extra cash for no work.
Do you have extra internet allowance left over each month? Did you know you could recoup some of this cost by selling your internet connection.
Honeygain is one of our preferred apps for this. You simply register and leave the app to run in the background of your device. The connection is used by web intelligence and research providers. It’s free to join and you can specify how much you wish to share.
Sign up here to get a free $5 at Honeygain.
These are just a few of the many ways to make extra money on the side. We cover these in more detail on our blog. You can find many more in our list of 50 ideas to build online income streams.
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