Student budgeting planner

Limit any spending splurges to the day BEFORE the student loan hits your bank account

Once you've worked out exactly what you've got coming in and going out over the course of the university year, you'll be able to do the maths to see what your rough weekly budget is.

Try your best to stick to this budget. Of course, there will come times when you'll be tempted to overspend and splurge. Our advice is to leave any splurges until the end of your budgeting period – that way you know exactly how much money you've got left over from the current budget before the next period of budgeting kicks in.

Try not to splurge on the day a new budget starts, as this can impact on the fun you can have later in the week or term, or, more seriously, your ability to buy essentials.

Need extra help to take control of your spending? Try the piggybanking technique

Doing a budget on paper is easy, the difficult bit is sticking to it. That takes either strong discipline or a decent technique. While we can't help you with the first, there IS a simple yet powerful method to help you take control of your spending. It's called piggybanking.

The piggybanking technique helps you automate your spending so you always know how much money you can truly spend. For all the information on how it works, see Martin's piggybanking explanation, but in brief...

• Step 1. Select your main categories of spending. The aim is to have your books balancing – so you're not spending more than you earn. To do that, you need to work out how much you can spend on different areas of your life. Once that's done, you need to scan through to see what the major categories are. This could be holidays, Christmas, clothes, birthdays, hobbies or whatever you spend on...
  
  
• Step 2. Set up several 'bills' accounts. Now you know how much money you want to spend on different items, the aim is to make it as simple as possible to know how much cash you have available.
  
  To do this the old-fashioned way, set up a number of different bank accounts, each with money in it for a different purpose, so the money's effectively in little pots (or different piggybanks). You should always have a main bank account and a separate bills account. Then pick the biggest three or four of your main spending categories above for the others.
  
  Or, if you don’t want to set up multiple accounts with different banks, many modern current accounts (such as Chase, Monzo and Starling) now offer simpler and quicker ways to split money into different pots that can be easily managed in one place, either via an app, or online. See our full piggybanking write-up for more details.

• Step 3. Use a standing order to feed the piggies. Now feed each of the piggybanks – including the bills account, which you should always overestimate slightly – from your main account. Set up standing orders to shift the right amount of cash each month.
  

Now when you look in your main account, you know it really shows how much you have to spend, as all the money for bills and other key areas has been shifted out.