Money at Uni!

It's that beautiful time of the term when you look at your online bank account and all of a sudden you've got an extra £1000/$800 (depending on where you live) or more in your account and you feel a little bit like this:

But trust me...this feeling will soon turn into:

when you begin to realise that nearly all of that loan will end up covering either your rent, bills or books for your course if your like me and do a degree that revolves around books.

The little bit of your money that you have left over is supposed to be for the rest of the term but for most students out there it goes a little like this:

1. loan comes 
2. freshers week hits
3. alcohol happens
4. loan is gone in less than two weeks. 

I'm writing this blog entry as a helpful guide to save your money as much as possible because believe me I know what it's like to be at the point where you're running so low on money that you have to remove the blue bits of the bread because you're refusing to go to the shops...I'm now refusing myself to get to that situation again so here are some tips that I'm going to leave you with:

• If you have an online bank account, check it weekly! I have an online account and never checked it as a sort of fear as to what I was going to witness but trust me it helps, I've prevented myself from going into my overdraft on many occasions because of this easy little tip

• If you have to go out then PRE-DRINK! It's so much cheaper and sometimes ends up being more fun than the actual night because you're with your closest friends and not sweaty

• When you're out don't take your card with you!!! Taking your debit card with you to a club or to your student's union is the worst mistake and nothing's worse than that feeling of waking up the next day realising you bought at least 10 drinks for yourself plus loads for your friends and have no money left for actual food and necessities...your expression will usually be something like this every time "mum" or "dad" appears on your phone:

• Give yourself a weekly budget. If you're someone who likes to spend more money on going out than food consider that and also consider WHERE you live and where you do your weekly shop, a person's weekly budget who lives in Norwich is going to be very different to the weekly shop of a person living in London. 

• Look for the sales! I just bought the most amazing boots in a 50% off sale and know I will wear them all the time.

• Make sure you buy your books before freshers week! This is important and something I stupidly didn't do last year. Trust me, you don't want to be the only person on your first ever seminar without your book! I've definitely learnt from that mistake. 

I hope that my little useful tips help. I will regularly remind you of another useful guide to saving money but for now, I think that's enough. I hope those of you that have returned to work, school or uni are having a great time and if not it's midway through the week so you don't have long till the weekend.

You know where to find me,

Cheerio,

Emma

X

P.S An extra little note: for all those twitter lovers out there, I've set myself up on the social site so follow me @ezmaar :)