As we mentioned in the previous video in our budgeting series, budgeting is an incredibly
important aspect of life, particularly for students pursuing higher education.
Once you have built the basics of your budget, noted down your expenses and income, and figured
out your budgeting goals, you can finally confront a problem that many students face:
what are you going to do when your funds cannot cover all of your expenses? If your monthly costs
exceed your projected budget, you should consider what you are going to do to make up for the budget
deficit or what you're going to cut out to make sure that you can afford your monthly expenses.
Here are some budgeting methods that you could try. Try making online orders for your grocery
list at different grocery stores, but don't actually buy the list. Instead, use it as
a resource to compare and contrast how much your groceries would cost at different stores.
This will allow you to see how much you can cut down on your grocery costs just by going to a
specific grocery location. Cut down on going out slash eating out. This doesn't mean that you have
to stop seeing your friends over a meal. You could simply say that you're only going to go out or eat
out once a week in order to fit your budget. You can also come up with cost-saving alternatives,
like a picnic or a pot luck. Find some dupes for your expensive skincare, personal care products,
clothing, etc. For example, skincare is very important to a lot of people,
including myself. Say, instead of buying a $60 moisturizer, you could find one that's just as
good for only $25 dollars instead. The same method could be applied to other things. For example,
instead of buying designer jeans you could try finding ones in the same style,
equal quality, but at a lower cost. It is also important to consider that small things that
you might not even think about, when accumulated, might be eating up a large portion of your budget.
It's somewhat cliched, but think about how much you spend every day on things like coffee.
Or in my case, yerba mate. Sa, you spend five dollars on one caffeine drink every weekday.
That's $25 dollars per week, which adds up to a $100 dollars per month.
That's more than a week's worth of groceries in just caffeine! Meanwhile, you could easily
buy a tin of coffee for under five dollars and make a latte at home and a travel mug.
What happens if you cut down your cost to your basics and you still find yourself with the
deficit? This is when you need to start looking at either finding a job or finding yourself a form of
financial assistance. There are a few options that you could look, into you could consider
whether student loans would be a good option for you. Student loans can seem daunting at first,
but sometimes they are essential to fund your education and they can be as seen as an investment
in yourself. If you're using this resource to figure out how to budget your student loans, refer
back to noting your basic costs and adjusting the way that you spread out your student loans to make
sure that they last the entire semester. What a lot of people don't know is that student loans
often don't cover the full amount of what you need for an entire academic year. This is labeled
by student loans as "unmet need", which can be in part combatted by applying for bursaries.
Bursaries are needs-based funding provided by universities, however ,unlike scholarships,
you don't need to have a specific grade point average in order to qualify for bursaries;
you simply need to be a full-time student with student loans that have unmet need. You can apply
for bursaries through the Student Services Centre website at UBC at the start of the school year,
but keep in mind that your bursary money is often paid to you after the first semester,
so factor that into your budgeting plan. Lastly, there are scholarships. Scholarships
are usually academic based and sometimes contain a community element. For example,
some scholarships simply require that you have a particular grade point average. Others can
require a specific average within your department and a third element, such as identifying as being
from an equity-seeking group, and others focus on whether or not you have supported
any community development, such as starting a new initiative or being part of a team sport.
While you're automatically considered for some scholarships when you attend UBC,
there are hundreds of scholarships out there that you can apply for. Another way to deal with
the deficit in your budget is to get a part-time work position. If you're a UBC student consider
applying for a Work Learn position. These are jobs provided by UBC that usually pay competitive wages
and are only 10 hours a week to make sure that you have enough time to focus on your studies.
The job hours work around your class schedule and are an excellent option if you're trying to
fit work into your school schedule. They are also excellent ways to get into your faculties industry
and see if you might want to start on a particular career path. Check with your institution if they
provide a similar program, or if they endorse jobs on campus. Consider budgeting at the end of
each semester for the next one so that you can see whether your budget requires you to start applying
for part-time positions, or seasonal or summer work. There's nothing worse than realizing you
have a deficit in your budget, starting to look for part-time positions, and finding out that
a position that you would have really liked or would have been perfect for has already finished
hiring. There are also options for creating your own stream of revenue. Consider selling
items that you no longer have any use or need for, such as excess clothing or old textbooks.
Thank you for watching our budgeting resource video. We hope that you find this video useful,
and that your budgeting goes well! For more useful resources, be sure to check out the
rest of our Budgeting Resource guide, and other tools on our website learningcommons.ubc.ca.