When you travel, the thing you most worry about is money. How much am I going to spend? How much do I have left? How much do I need for today? These are all common questions, however, when you study abroad, those wonderings become even more difficult to answer. It doesn’t matter where you are going, the steps to not get lost in your bank account are the same.
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1. Organize and plan ahead
First of all, please, organize yourself way before your actual trip. You need to know the exact amount of money you are going to be with, if it’s on credit card or on cash, or even both. It’s important to make a prevision, a sort of a plan, how much you are going to separate for your transportation, how much for your food and for shopping in general. You probably won’t follow that exactly as you have put, but it will help you know how much you can spend everyday.
2. Transportation
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For that plan to make sense, you need to search the way you are going to move around the city, it can be public transportation like busses and trains, or it can also be alternative ways, like bicycles. When you get to know the location you are staying, search on google maps how long does it take for you to get to your school, in that way, you will be able to know which transport it’s more likely for you to use. If it takes less than 30 minutes, you might be able to rent a bike, but only if the structure of the city allows that.
Otherwise, you will have to use public transportation, in that case, always look for the prices of the tickets, because you might have to take more than one transport. While you are searching for the prices, check it out if the city has the possibility to buy a day ticket or even a month ticket. Those types of tickets are like benefits, for example, if you buy the day pass you will only have to pay once and you can use it all day, so it becomes cheaper. It’s the same logic for the weakly pass and the month pass.
3. Always convert the money
Next step, shopping. It doesn’t matter what you are going to buy, convert everything, it’s not because you are out of your country that things are cheaper. It’s important to know the difference between your coin and the coin of the country you are staying, those things may change really fast, so stay alert. Furthermore, a special tip is to ask everywhere if they have discounts for students, you may have a surprise of how much stores work with that benefit. However, when you go buy a trip around the country, for example during the weekend with your friends, consult the agencies at your school and ask for recommendations, because many can be fake and you might end up losing more money than you think. After checking, you may start looking wich one the cost compensates the experience.
4. Food
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Another thing that makes students lose a lot of money is food. If you have the opportunity to have one of the meals at your house, please, do it. Buying food is like an addiction, especially because you want to try a lot of differents things that you don’t have in your country. Don’t worry, you can try whatever you want, but divide and taste things in different days, so you can organize better the everyday cost, and it becomes more balanced. In case you don’t have the “free meal” at the place you are staying, ask at your school wich place around the city isn’t that expensive, so you can go there with your friends. But if you want to discover yourself, it’s always a great way to get to know the city.
5. Track your expenses
And now the last, but not least tip: controle how much you spend everyday. You don’t have to be strict with yourself and keep all the papers and tickets, we all know that at some point one of them will get lost. But, you must have at least a notion of how much you spent in that day, so write it down somewhere or in the notes of you phone, there are even free apps that you can download. Then, at the end of the each day, add up everything that you spent and subtract for what you still have. In that way, you will be able to plan for the next days and enjoy your trip.