Student Budget

Growing up with a father in the finance world, I’ve seen plentiful spreadsheets about the family budget that made my head spin. As I grew up, I watched him explain said calculations to my elder brothers who have disappeared into the “working adult realm”.

It’s nothing to be shy about – having almost no awareness of where some of your money goes when you’re young. But as you begin making more calculated decisions, you start to realise that having those details written down would be so much more beneficial to your lifestyle.

Now, you shouldn’t get scared either. As a youth, you have the privilege of starting slow and building up to what your parents might be doing. You don’t even need a complex budgeting system – you just need to understand how to keep track of it first.

1. Pick your platform and template.

First things first, choose what’s the best software for you to use. If you want to keep it simple just open up a Microsoft Excel file or a Google Sheets file. From there you could start from scratch and list down the categories of your income (salary, allowance, scholarships) and expenses (food, shopping, tuition fees, entertainment). Or you could search for templates like these to give you that rough idea.

2. Personalise to your lifestyle

If you choose a template, this is the part where you can delete irrelevant categories or add on the ones that best suit your lifestyle. For example, you may not have “Photography” in your expenses but you do have “Netflix” or “Spotify”. This is the best step to truly understand what you can budget in your monthly expenses.

3. Track. Track. Track.

Now that you have your budget tracker ready, it’s time to actually track it. If it’s your first time, try to simply observe how your monthly expenses are. Then, as you log in the total expenses every end of the month, you can better budget your daily expenses for the next month. And the process repeats.

The best thing about organizing your spending in a spreadsheet is when you are able to save even RM1 in your monthly budget. Because what a better way to celebrate than treating yourself to some ice-cream?