Student Life on a Budget - 7 More Tips for Saving Money

Indeed, the life of a university student is one of a tight budget. Your bank account is literally empty. Your tax return that you received a couple of weeks ago is all gone. Your credit card is maxed out, or close to it, with Bills to pay left right and centre. Sound familiar? GradTips provides you a list of handy hints to improve your financial situation, without pulling out teeth and selling them to the tooth fairy.

1. Spend less!
Make sure that you aim to spend as little as you need to at university. Forgot a pen? Don’t buy another one, just ‘borrow’ one from a mate. Have no lunch? Just battle it out and eat when you get home (although, this isn’t advisable every day…). Also, make sure that you withdraw smaller amounts of money from the bank, and limit your ATM machine usage. For example, I always make it a rule that I withdraw cash once a fortnight, for $160. And in the situation where I start to run low, I adhere to the next few rules:

2. Bring Left Overs From Home
Depending on whether or not you live at home, the best way to save money is to cut down the amount of money on food. It’s crazy how much we tend to spend on this inherent human need - if you do the math, 5 working days X $10 per meal = $50 worth of savings a week. This is $200 a month, up to $2.4k per year. Imagine what you could have done by initially investing this amount instead. When you can, try buying raw foods from the supermarket and put together your lunches the day before you leave for work or uni / college.

3. Reduce Home Bandwidth - Download at University
Reduce internet home bills by downloading and using the internet bandwith at work or university. Now, I’m not promoting that everyone should be downloading music or movies from work or uni, but if you need to do anything such as checking large emails, uploading photos, or downloading large reading materials / pdf files, it’s probably best done in an environment which is not only convenient; but free!

4. Print At University… or Print Less
The former referring to the same idea as point item #3 - utilise the resources available at university or work while it is free. It’s rather annoying to keep changing printer cartridges at home, which may cost up to $50 each! Also make sure that when you print power point slides or documents, try setting it to duplex mode (double sided) and try placing 2,3, or 6 slides per page. This way, not only will you save printer and paper costs, but you’ll also be doing your part for the environment.

5. Use your student card. Use it wisely.
Student cards can be used for many things. In Sydney, public transport via trains, buses and ferries is one main use. Others include local restaurants around uni, movie theatres, some retail outlets within shopping centres, hair cuts, you name it. Within specific universities, such as UNSW and USyd, student concession cards are valid until March of the year after your final year of studies. Make sure to utilise this to get half price fares on your train tickets… I know I did back in the day!

6. Sell unwanted secondhand books
When you are ready to part ways with your text books, make sure you sell them as soon as you can to get some easy cash in your wallet. This can be done in various ways, such as online portals like textbookexchange.com.au or through your university’s own second hand book store, such as the Co-op bookshop chain in and around Sydney CBD. You must make sure that it is sold as soon as you possibly can, as textbooks will be harder to sell as new editions are published, making your book largely obsolete, irrelevant and out of date (depending on your area of study, of course).

7. Sell things lying around on the internet (eBay anyone?)
Look around your bedroom. Are there items which you never touch or use anymore that you are willing to give up? Gone are the days of garage sales, and now prevalent among many young students, is the uptake of online auctions such as eBay.com.au and oztion.com.au. Old, rare and vintage items can be sold for a fairly high price these days. A simple example is when I sold my playstation games, specifically Final Fantasy IX (9) which sold for more than $130 Australian as it was uncommon, the original edition, and had barely been scratched at all. Be careful however, once you sell something that was once precious to you, it will be almost impossible to get back.

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