4 Budgeting Techniques For College Students || By A College Student

The Process

Do you want to learn how to better manage your finances? Are you sick of not knowing your financial standing?

Learn how to create a budget and manage your money in a way that fits your goals!

The number of steps toward creating your personalized budget will depend upon your goal. I will guide you through the overall steps necessary for creating a budget and from there you can personalize it to your specific needs! These steps help ensure that the plan to achieve your dreams is set in stone. There is nothing like the assurance of achieving your dreams.

I will provide you with 4 budgeting techniques, particularly for college students and young adults. Additionally, there will be examples of their layouts so that you can have easy-to-understand guidelines along with advice on editing for your unique needs.

Once you have your goals in place, the plan is easy to lay out. The basic premise of your budget plan truly consists of your aspirations and values.

This may include the extent of the future value you may be aiming for and what you are willing to do to get there. Your future value is the monetary value you aim or expect to obtain in the future. While your overall values consist of why you do what you do. For instance, if you strongly value family time then you should make that a very important factor in your plan.

When making your budget you have to consider your time and what you spend that time on. Considering your core values helps you manage when and where you can spend the remainder of your time.

As you can probably tell, budgeting can help a lot with time management!

When stumbling through life as a young adult/college student, these things are very crucial as you may have a busy and chaotic schedule. A lot of college involves the process of disbursing your time to all of your courses while having enough left over for work and your social life.

College is a time to remember, but the fun of it is often based on time and money management.

Follow the step-by-step process below to help create your own budget! There will be Excel and Google Sheet examples provided below.

1.	Setting Your Goal/s
2.	What Plan Will Work Best for Your Goal/s (include bullets of tips)
3.	Google Spreadsheets Vs. Excel
4.	How to Set Up Your Spreadsheet & Terms to Include
5.	Examples & More Resources

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1. Setting Your Goal/s

Think about what you want to achieve and when you want to achieve it. Do you want to be able to simply meet monthly expenses? Or do you want to Save?

Set a time frame and a goal to achieve in that time frame. If you are struggling with figuring out what you want, then think about what you may not want. Such as, if you don’t want to be renting in 2 years, then you will probably want to plan on buying a property. This would require saving a specific amount in a specific period of time.

Here are some common examples:

Monthly expense planning.
Investing plan.
Savings plan.
Debt pay-off plan. (loans, credit cards)
Business start-up plan.

Once you have your goal, write it down along with all the details you can think of. Be as specific as possible. Have your time frame and what will be achieved in the end. Again if you don’t have a goal or are unsure about it, start with things you would hate to have happen or you really don’t want.

Now that you have that, write down your values underneath your goal/s.

You should have a clear understanding of your values so that you don’t end up sacrificing what you truly value or your end result, because once you achieve that goal it won’t be worth it if you had sacrificed what truly matters to you.

2. What Plan Will Work Best for Your Goal/s

Management of Monthly expenses

50:30:20

50% of your income towards expenses

30% of your income towards savings (an emergency fund)

20% of your income towards entertainment/fun things

The overall point of a monthly expense-oriented plan is to cover your expenses before you do anything else. These percentages may fluctuate based on your unique needs and desires, but these starting guidelines are great to go by!

If you already have an emergency fund then I suggest either changing the 30% to investments (Roth IRA, S&P 500, or other index funds) or if one of your values is having fun right now then entertainment/fun things can take this position.

Debt/Loan Payoff

This plan will depend on whether you want to chip away at debt aggressively or as your budget will allow.

Aggressive Approach in Percentages:

50%- to your loan payments

30%- to your expenses

20%- entertainment and savings

Low-Income Approach in Percentages:

50%- to your expenses, or more if needed

30%- to your loan/debt payments

20%- to savings (because with a low budget, it is a good idea to have a buffer.)

Before you decide on either of these approaches it is advised that you contact your loan lender or debt holder because there may be a penalty fee for paying the debt off early.

Build Wealth

Percentage Approach:

50%- to your investments (stocks, index funds, real estate, education, etc.)

30%- to your expenses

20%- to your savings/emergency fund (this is really important so that you don’t have to take money out from your investments.)

For this goal, I have built an investing assessment spreadsheet for you to compare the returns on particular investments. Additionally, in our resources section, I have linked an investment simulator that is free to use and great for starting out!

If you have no idea what I am saying when I mention the word investment, that is okay. That is what this platform is here for. I will write posts that dive deeper into investing and why you should be thinking about it. If this is one of your goals, for now, I suggest saving your money until you know how to analyze investments or until you have tested the investment simulator so you can get an idea of what it is and what it does.

If you know what an investment is and you plan to use my spreadsheet, I strongly suggest comparing and buying multiple different stocks. By this I mean don’t just buy 20 shares of Amazon and call it good. Additionally, don’t just calculate the returns of buying 20 shares on Amazon. Diversify your shares by buying into many different companies. When you compare companies do a lot, it will only help to compare more.

In addition to investing, it should be stated that saving your money is not BUILDING wealth. It certainly helps that process but it is not the only step. If you only save your money then it will be eaten by inflation. The value of our money goes down constantly and it needs to be recognized. This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t save, but if you do save you should put your savings in a high-yield savings account. I do not suggest putting all of your savings into a high-yield account because it is not quickly accessible; furthermore, a high-yield savings account is an account where you can store your money and earn interest. This interest is good interest, it helps you earn money on the money you already have.

Good resources include Investopedia and Yahoo Finance.

This will be talked about more in future posts.

Savings Plan (what will you be saving for and how much you will need)

Once you know what you are saving for it will be easy to plan out the when and what factors.

There are three important questions to ask when you save for something; Why are you saving for it? How much will you need? When will you need it?

In order to stick with savings plans you have to maintain a good source of motivation. If you lose sight of why you started you are unlikely to continue. Write down the answers to these questions and keep the answers in an accessible place for the future.

For your specific goals, I suggest using our spreadsheet to guide you in the saving process. Please note that this is not a requirement to obtain your savings goal. A lot of people associate a spreadsheet with anxiety and “To-Do’s”, but it can simply be a record of your progress.

Percentage Approach:

50%- to your savings

40%- to your expenses

10%- to your entertainment/fun

Etc.

For goals that have not been stated, I suggest customizing the month-to-month budget guidelines/spreadsheet. If you don’t understand it or you have other specific needs, please feel free to reach out to me for a consultation or just a simple message and I will work with you and your needs.

3. Google Spreadsheets Vs. Excel

Google Spreadsheets and Excel are two different platforms in which you can organize, sort, and analyze data. You can use these tools for other things than data analysis, but they are generally used for numerical purposes.

As a new user, the differences between the two are minimal. When you start to get into more in-depth analysis the differences become larger. For these purposes, I will only cover the main differences so that you can determine what will work best for you.

Google Spreadsheets

It is a free service.
You can use it directly through your Google account.
You can connect sheets with Google Forms for easier data entry (which works well for budgeting.)
It is easier to navigate.

Excel

It costs money to use unless you already pay for Microsoft 360 (if you are currently in college, some universities provide this service through your school email.)
It is more difficult to navigate.
It offers more in-depth analysis options.
Pre-created workbooks are easier for new users, but it’s harder to create your own from scratch. We create accessible Budget xlsx.s for you to download.
If you are tech-savvy, I would suggest this platform due to its wide array of options.

4. How to Set Up Your Spreadsheet & Terms to Include

I suggest making a list of everything you would like to include before even opening an Excel/Google Sheet. From the previous steps you should already have decided on a plan or have an idea of what you would like to focus on. With this, you should have a good outline to start working.

To start your spreadsheet you should always have income and expenses.

Depending on your goal you will have:

Month-to-month should have savings and entertainment sections.
Debt payoff should have your debt payments, savings, and possibly an entertainment section.
Savings oriented should have a large savings section with times and amounts, additionally, there may be an entertainment section.
Any other plan will obtain sections as seen fit.

5. Examples & More Resources

Below I will attach budget sheets for 4 different types of financial planning. If none of the provided sheets fit your needs, you can either edit it for your needs or you can submit a request for a personalized budget sheet using my provided contact information[RB1] .

There will be two different options for download: Excel Workbooks or Google Sheets. Based on the information I provided under segment 4, you should download from whichever platform works best for you.

Feel free to download both and compare or use the images to compare the benefits and downfalls.

Examples: