Personal finance. It is a subject that is part of anyone’s routine, but have you ever thought college is an excellent time to start establishing a healthy relationship with money? After all, if you reach this stage still young, the chances of achieving a quiet financial situation during adulthood and old age are much higher!
As if it were not enough to worry about the grades at the end of each semester, one of most university students’ significant problems is dealing with the lack of money. It is difficult to pay for college, rent, books, transportation, and food. It also excludes the other activities included in the student’s daily life!
Has this scenario seemed too familiar to you? To help organize your financial life, here are several tips for keeping your accounts in order and saving for a better future. Check out!
How to Organize Personal Finances Early?
Have you ever wondered if you had taken a course called Financial Planning for Beginners in elementary or high school? No doubt you could consider yourself privileged! After all, most students do not have any contact with financial education during their primary education.
That is why, when they reach youth and adulthood, people find it difficult to start saving, even knowing the basics about how to make investments. In the family, financial education is a topic that tends to pass well away from the conversations. Due to these shortcomings, people get into debt quickly. They often live with the rope around their necks to close the accounts at the end of the month.
But beware: even with this unfavorable track record in the country, you’re not required to go that route, okay? Quite the opposite: you can take advantage of college time to start your financial planning and thus not suffer from the lack of money in the future.
It is noteworthy that, because you are young, you have several advantages that others no longer have, such as time to accumulate resources. In addition, youth is when you can change habits more efficiently and have more energy to overcome challenges. So, anyone who realizes early on the importance of setting economic goals will possibly achieve goals equally soon.
Revenue and Expenses
Revenue can be understood as all the money that goes into your budget, be it salary, internship, remuneration for freelance work, or the result of the sale of products or services, among other diverse possible origins. The expense is the opposite, referring to the amounts that leave your budget. In an ideal scenario, revenues must exceed costs. Otherwise, your budget will turn red.
Savings and Investment
If you strive to leave a scrap of resources every month, you can form a saving – here understood as the result of the act of saving and not like that famous application offered by the banks. Getting into the habit of keeping monthly, you accumulate, little by little, a significant amount. With this, you can go to the investment world to make your money yield.
What to do with Debt?
No matter how rare it is for someone to live without making a debt, this cannot be an excuse for the lack of control of personal finances! The idea is not to have outstanding debt. If you cannot keep it that way, try to adjust the obligations to your income and ability to pay. And without despair because we will explain this relationship later.
While outsiders may think that a student has no reason to have debts, the truth is that graduation requires a lot of spending. For example, only the funding for a particular college already represents a relevant portion of the monthly budget. Even if I can start repaying the principal amount of the loan only after graduating, part of the income will still compromised for four years or even more.
Cash Flow
When faced with so many possibilities of debts, controlling everything that comes in and what goes out of the personal budget is essential when organizing finances. To do so, get used to using a management tool called cash flow – which is much used in the business environment. Believe me: this feature will be very useful in achieving a very bluish financial life!
To make it easier to understand, imagine this tool as an employee of any company’s warehouse who must write down everything that comes in and everything out of stock. In your case, you will use the cash flow to record your budget’s receipts (receipts) and outflows (expenses). Thus, you will know exactly where your money came from and where your money went.
By adopting this strategy, you will not forget the little expenses that usually go unnoticed, making a big difference at the end of the month. We are talking about coffee with cheese bread in the college cafeteria and even that ice cream you drink for dessert every 15 days.
It is quite true that it is not enough to record expenditure. It is necessary to think critically about all expenditures to identify which are essential and necessary but can be postponed and which are superfluous and should be left out.
Moreover, using resources from these sources shows that the university has not adequately controlled its finances!
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