This post is going to be an introductory guide to Student Finance, whether you are a high school student or someone who is just entering college, or maybe you’re even older than that and you just want to learn a little bit more about Student Finance. We are just going to be going over the very basics of the framework that makes up Student Finance and managing your own money.

Do keep in mind that some of these tips might only apply to you if you are an adult and can legally open your own financial accounts and that can help student finance. And they’re kind of us specific because I don’t really know the details of how finances work in other countries, but the basic principles of money management and budgeting still apply to everyone.

Without further Ado, let us get started.

To start off with the student finance topic, you might be a little bit confused about what personal finance exactly is. In simple terms, it’s the system through which your income flows out, eventually into you having things and surviving. Let’s look at it in the analogy of a system of Rivers and streams and Lakes.

The whole ocean or all of the water in the world is just all of the income or spending that ever exists in an economy. Then you take some of that in for yourself as your own income that feeds into your personal finance water stream.

Then that water, which represents money, flows into different Rivers and streams that are different ways that your money can be spent or places they can go. Sometimes they’ll also collect in Lakes, which are places where you store and save up your money.

If a lot of the terms and things I’m saying sound a little bit confusing, don’t worry, part one is income. You do, in fact, need to make money in order to manage your money. I know a mind-blowing concept.

Student Finance planning through part time jobs

If you’re a full-time high school or College student, you probably can’t pursue a full-time job. But there are still a lot of different options for you to earn some money and maybe do something that’s fulfilling to you. Here are some ideas about how we as students can make an income, and a lot of these will still apply. Even if you’re under 18. You can do traditional kid’s jobs like babysitting walking dogs or mowing people’s lawns.

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A lot of colleges also have on-campus jobs where you can work in the cafeteria or the Student Union. There are a lot of different options, and you can check them out on your University’s website. You could start your own small business. Maybe you want to make stickers or handmade scrunchies or any other idea you have under the sun. It can probably be sold online or at Sunday flea markets or local markets.

You might consider a lot of different options for part-time work as well, such as being a barista or working in retail, or maybe interning. If that’s an option available to you. Try to get a paid internship because an unpaid internship doesn’t produce any income and does not make student finance.

Another option for a fully Internet-based business is a blog or a YouTube channel. Speaking of getting an income through an online YouTube channel, you can also earn from sponsors too, one of the best student finance sources nowadays.

So am I just trying to convince me that I can do some sort of like, social justice positivity thing, but I’m actually just promoting some sort of capitalist agenda? Just let me know what you think in the comments.

The ideas I’ve mentioned can be ways for you to start earning an income or add on additional side hustles to supplement your income. Once you’ve figured out that situation for yourself, your second step is to look into a checking account, which could be a major factor in student finance.

Checking account can help student finance

To open your own checking account, you do need to be an adult, but if you are a minor, you can still open one that’s in your own name, but a custodial account that is technically owned by your parents. And this checking account is the first stop for all of your income.

It’s the largest main river that all of your money flows into from the ocean of income, and then it flows out of that river and splits off into wherever your money can go. You could also compare it to an airport terminal where the money comes in like an airplane landing, and then it exits to the other destinations where it needs to go. This is a place where your money should stop, but should never be the final resting place.

In general, you want to keep about a month’s worth of expenses in your checking account, but not much more than that, because checking accounts have very low-interest rates, which means anything you’re storing in there is just losing value due to inflation.

What that means is that generally, at least here in the US, inflation will reduce the value of your money by about 2% or 3% annually. Conversely, checking accounts usually have absolutely abysmal interest rates, like mine has a .1% interest rate.

That means that even though I gain a teeny tiny, tiny bit of interest in my checking account, overall I’m still losing that two to 3% in value every single year. You can’t really optimize it to make you money.

What you can do is optimize it to prevent you from losing money. I’m not here to recommend specific checking accounts because I’m not really an expert enough to make those recommendations, but I do want to advise you on ways to avoid two of the most common ways that people are losing money.

The first one to avoid is the account minimum fee or an annual maintenance fee, whatever they call it. Basically, some accounts will require you to keep a minimum level of money in your account every month, or they will charge you a fee like 2030, even $50 to even just have an account. But you want to read into the rules for your checking account and do what it takes to avoid those fees.

Just keep the minimum balance or sign up for online alerts or whatever it is they’re asking for. Or Conversely, just pick a checking account that doesn’t have any of these fees. The second kind of fee that you definitely want to avoid is the overdraft fee or the insufficient balance fee.

And this happens when you try to transfer money out of your checking account or spend something from your debit card, but you just don’t have the money in there. Another thing you might want to do is link your checking account to a savings account with overdraft protection.

And that basically means if you try to charge something to your savings account but there’s not enough money in it, your checking account will automatically transfer in some money from your savings account to cover that and avoid the overdraft fee. Now that we’ve gone over the checking account, let’s talk about where the money goes from the airport terminal.

Saving habits can help student finance

It’s especially important for us as young people to get into the habit and a healthy mindset of budgeting and living within your means. I’m not here to tell you you have to completely micromanage every single dollar that you’re spending, but it is important that you’re mindful of where your money is going and for this, I recommend the 52,030 rule which is a pretty popular personal finance guideline that was actually popularized by Elizabeth Warren.

This general guideline States that about 50% of your income should be going to mandatory living expenses, 30% to nice to have expenses, and 20% to savings. Now we as students might have drastically different balances within this. For example, maybe you live with your parents and attend a public high school so you don’t really have that many living expenses that could save a lot in student finance.

Or Conversely, maybe you’re paying for your own tuition at a private school and it’s really eating up a lot of your income. So the vast majority of us will need to rebalance these 50 30 20 buckets. With that in mind, let’s go over what exactly these three categories are and how you can optimize each of them. These will also correspond to the steps that I mentioned on the river flow chart that I showed earlier.

First, we have got the theoretically largest category which is must-have spending. This includes stuff like groceries, debt payments, maybe you’ve got student loans, your tuition, and school supplies, housing costs like rent and utilities, your cell phone bill, and your WiFi. I’d also consider anything you have to use for your job as a mandatory expense. For example, I have a $30 a month Adobe apps subscription that I would consider a mandatory expense for my job. Now since these are mandatory Tory, it’s very hard to lower their costs.

But two tips I do have. First, you can negotiate a lot of your bills or at least shop around to get the best price. There are all those ads about how like you can save 15% or more on cars.