The rising tuition fees have made attending university a very daunting prospect for many students. When this sharp increase in fees is combined with a high cost of living, it means that managing your finances and ensuring that you can live comfortably can be difficult. Fortunately, today’s students have found a few fantastic way to manage their finances each month and ensure that it does not impact their studies and lifestyle.
- Budgeting
The most important tip is to create a budget and stick to it for each week. To establish a budget, you first need to add up your total income. This could include student loan, savings, income from a job, grants or bursaries and money from parents/guardians. Next, you subtract essential outgoings. These include tuition fees, rent, household bills, insurance, phone bill, travel and food. The figure you are left with is what you can then spend on other items such as socialising, household supplies, books for your course and clothes. There are many great online tools or apps that can help with sticking to your budget.
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- Part-Time Work
Another way that students have combated the increase in tuition fees is to take on part-time work. This can give a great boost to your income and give you cash to use on yourself, plus it will it may also give you transferable skills and experience that will help in the future. However, it is crucial that this work does not interfere with your studies, so you must be ruthless at organising your time. Ideally, the work will be flexible and you can communicate openly with your employer about your studies.
- Short-Term Loans
If you find yourself in need of some fast cash to cover part of your income, you should consider a short-term loan which is what many students are now doing. There are companies that are created solely to help students, including Smart Pig. Companies like this provide same day loans of up to around £350 until your next student finance payment. Student payday loan businesses typically have improved pricing, loan terms and procedures than regular payday loan companies.
These three methods are all great ways for students to manage their finances and handle the rise of tuition fees. With careful planning and regularly checking your finances each week, you should be able to stay on top of your bills and not have your studies or social life impacted by fees and cost of living.
Studying on the internet has made it possible for lots of people with other life commitments to get the college education they want to pursue their dreams, such as online business programs that can help people who want to be entrepreneurs or executives, vocational programs for people with a certain field they’d love to work in, and IT courses for those who want a career in tech. People choose online study for a lot of reasons – it can be much cheaper than attending a college, and can also allow them to keep working or stay at home with their family. However, while it does make a good balance between study and other aspects of life more easily achievable, you do need to be able to manage your time well to be able to get the most from your online course while fitting it around your family life.
Here are three rules to try imposing on yourself to help with your time management when you are doing an online business degree or other course with an online university:
‘Book’ Your Study Time
If you make a study schedule (which everybody should), treat those times in your calendar when you are set to study as being times when you are booked up, as if you were at an appointment or working, even if you’ll just be at home. Talk about time that way to friends and family, who may just assume that because you are at home, you are available to chat or do stuff with them.
Your Course Is Never a Low Priority
Even if you are doing your course at your own pace and don’t have to finish in a fixed time, you want to get the benefits of doing it in terms of your career or business idea as soon as you can, right? If so, then you should make it a rule that your course is a priority that you don’t drop just because something else came up. View your scheduled study sessions as just as much ‘hard’ appointments as other things you wouldn’t drop except for in an emergency, like work or attending your child’s big game or dance recital. If you treat it as that important, you should be able to ‘show up’ for each study session you book with yourself and not be tempted by possible alternatives to studying.
You’ll Never Plan All Nighters
A third good rule to adopt is that you will never treat ‘staying up all night’ as an option. While it, of course, is, the idea that you could do, it means you might be tempted to push back other study sessions, or not book in enough of them, thinking you can just work all night closer to that exam or date when your paper is due. Most students have done this, and know how horrible it is, so make it a rule that you will not treat it as an option to stay up all night in the future to avoid doing work immediately.
By following these rules you should have an easier time managing your schedule as an online student.
