Let’s face it… being a college girl is tough. If you don’t work to earn your cash, you are basically relying on an allowance from family, rationing that refund check, donating blood for money, or hoping for twenty-dollar bills to fall out of the sky. Living off what little funds you may have for college life can be hard. Don’t worry; all is not lost because there is a way to ball on a budget!
Shopping
Say you don’t have a meal plan but you have a micro fridge and a kitchen within reach. Eating delivery from Dandy’s and Pizza Hut can get expensive, boring, and unhealthy. If you have some cooking skill, you will be able to save money just by cooking your own food! The only issue with buying groceries is the groceries tend to get expensive especially if you like name brand cereals. Well, once you don’t have steady income, you are going to have to give up breakfast with Apple Jacks and eat store brand variety. I promise the generic brands aren’t bad! You won’t really mind eating Apple Flavored O’s once you realize how much money you’re saving.
Another way to save money via grocery shopping is to become a master of comparison shopping. Comparison shopping is exactly what it sounds like: you observe the different prices of similar products and pick the least expensive product. For example, I was shopping for Oreos and I went to three stores: CVS, Target, and Giant. CVS priced Oreos at $4.39, Target priced them at about $3.00, and Giant priced them at $2.77. Can you guess which store I purchased Oreos from? Giant! They are all the same Oreos and I couldn’t understand why CVS had to make them so expensive!
The best way to save money grocery shopping is to shop at a grocery store. Grocery stores like Giant and Safeway have store cards that allow you access to their daily deals. These cards allow you to buy items at the sale price instead of the regular retail price. It is more fun to buy two half-gallons of apple juice for $5 with a store card instead of $2.79 + tax per half-gallon without one. These stores also have little newspapers with coupons in them. Coupons are your friends!
Shopping for Clothes/Shoes/Accessories
If you don’t need it, don’t buy it. That is rule number one. Howard girls feel pressure to keep up with the latest styles and trends. We were voted #2 Most Stylish University in the nation after all. It is better to get creative with you already own and have money to do what needs to be done than to be super-fly and have no money to rock that outfit at a social gathering. If you MUST keep up with the Jones, then you have to be smart about how you shop. Comparison shopping is a must, if you wish to keep your pockets full (or not-as-empty). Hunt for sales, visit thrift stores, and borrow accessories from friends (please return borrowed items!). There is a myriad of websites that offer shoes and clothes that look similar to name brand items at reasonable prices. I’m not saying you should by knock-offs. If you can’t afford the real thing, don’t buy anything like it; but you can get really cute off-brand items that will get you as many compliments as those Coach rain boots.
The main lesson I had to learn and am still learning is self-control. If you are anything like me, you will happen to walk past the window of a cute boutique and spot a pair of pumps you feel you MUST have. You will buy those shoes, later miss that $40, and end up never wearing those shoes. I’ve learned to keep walking after asking myself if I really need it and what I need it for. Sometimes asking yourself a million-and-one questions will discourage you from buying the product because it seems like too much effort to convince yourself to buy it. I also have a ritual while I’m inside of a store. I pick up all of the things I want in a store and walk around with them in the store aimlessly. If I am tired of carrying the items and wish to put them back, I didn’t want those items that badly in the first place.
Budget
Learn to budget! Figure out how much money you have or figure out how much money you will be receiving monthly from family and divide it up. There are budget calculators accessible all over the Internet that will help you do this. The simplest thing that I do is look at how much money I have and divide it up for the month I have received it. If I receive only $100 a month, I will figure out how to divide it up for four weeks. You can try to limit yourself to $25 a week, but that it very unrealistic. So I only allow myself to spend enough for groceries ($60 for the month) and I ration the rest between laundry and toiletries. Anything extra is just that: extra. Determine what you need first and then the left over can go towards the things you want.
Happy saving!