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The stress of spending money as a college student

This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at Lynn chapter.

It has crossed all of our minds at some point in time about stressing over the amount of money you are spending as a college student. As we all know money does not grow on trees and needs to be earned. Being given an allowance or getting a nice big paycheck at the end of each month can honestly make it hard to not spend rather than saving it for the future.

For me recently I’ve been feeling as though everything has become extremely expensive and my money is just disappearing. This is making me stressed and yes I do need to spend money but it makes me think that I’m not spending my money on the essential things. With that being said we have all been taught at some point in our lives how to budget, now would be the time to start practicing how to budget.

What I have done is I bought a journal off Amazon that helps me track my monthly expenses and income. You can track your expenses each day as well as your income therefore you can get a rough estimate of how much you spend each month. From this it is a very basic level and you can see how often you were spending money on certain things and if you can reduce that. In my personal opinion if we start doing this now you could end up saving more money to spend on entertainment or more adventurous things. You could end up having more of a social life if you know exactly where your money is going.   

I have just started doing this and just by tracking my expenses makes me feel better. It makes me feel as though I am taking responsibility for my actions and I am trying to save. This is my little piece of advice which helped me. It was a very simple basic step to help me figure out and be organized with my money. At this age it’s hard to keep track of where your money is going and how to earn money simply because we are young and do not necessarily have a stable income every month or a significant allowance that covers a college student‘s monthly expenses.

Lauren is an international student majoring in Hospitality Management. She is a very interactive, positive and friendly young lady who always gives of her best. She always wears a smile on her face and tries brighten up everyone’s day. She is very passionate about her home country and educating many young people about her beloved country.