Tag Archives: budgeting

Wants vs Needs Challenge

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After c hecking out Gail Vaz-Oxlade’s blog Making Money Make Sense I stumbled upon a blog post called Wants vs Needs. You may know her from Till Debt Do Us Part. Simply put and blunt, Gail explained that we all believe that everything we buy is a need, but in fact most often these purchases are wants. So I did a bit of challenge myself to see what kind of purchases I was making. Were they all needs? or were most of them frilly purchases that I could do without aka wants.

What you should do: Write your own list of your week, 2-week (however long you want) expenditures. Figure out if they are wants vs needs. Look over them again and make sure your needs really are needs and not in fact wants. Then evaluate how you are spending your money. Could you have made lunch more that week instead of buying food out? It’s definitely a great way to really think about how you are spending your money. You can be pretty surprised how all the little things add up.

Here’s a breakdown of my spending for a week (don’t judge me on any of this)

Thursday

  • WANT-Bulk Barn-$1.56
  • NEED-Metro-$3.00-Used Checkout 51 to get $2 off that Cereal..btw
  • NEED-TTC Fare-$3.00

Friday

  • NEED-Bought some TTC Tokens-7 tokens for $18.55
  • WANT-LCBO-$18 Bought myself some Shock Top Beer & a bottle of wine for my mom

Saturday

  • WANT-Went to Il Bun Ji-$23 for 5 beers, Bibimbap, mussels, popcorn and fruits (I’ll be writing a review about this awesome place soon btw!)
  • WANT-Smoke’s Poutine-$7 (I was super lame and bought traditional…who does that?)

Monday

  • NEED-Bought TTC Tokens-$18.55 (All those weekend outings cost me some additional coin)

Tuesday

  • WANT-Bulk Barn-$1.80

Wednesday

  • NEED-Bought throat lozenges since I’ve been battling a cold for 3 weeks. $4.50 

Thursday

  •  WANT-Went out for lunch at work-$11 (I could have eaten my packed lunch)

Conclusions

WANTS- 6 purchases

NEEDS-5 purchases

Basically you may be wondering, how are you even alive, aren’t you buying food? My life is a bit less studenty right now since I have been living with my parents, who I love to death. They have been letting me live rent free and feeding me since January so they have helped me reduce a lot of my costs. Additionally, I’m pretty happy with my almost 50/50 split on wants vs needs, and felt like I was really fair when I determined a want vs need. For the most part, transportation has been my most common need lately, but I have been fortunate enough to get rides to work with my cousin since January, I just take the TTC home. I also managed to take the TTC all the way home from Christie and Bloor on Saturday, saving myself a ton of money in cab fare (would have cost me a good $25 dollars 1 way probably).

Also I’m wondering where my extra TTC tokens went…pretty sure my wallet eats tokens.

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New Year’s Resolutions

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Most students when they think of new years resolutions think about getting fit, losing weight, getting better marks at school, but its less likely that the first resolution idea that comes to mind is becoming healthier financially. Unfortunately one of the reasons why students struggle with money and in turn debt after university is the lack of planning and often crazy spending habits throughout the year. So of course because it’s that time of year, I’ve decided to go through my new year’s resolutions and some things you should consider about your own.

One of the objectives I hope to achieve with this blog this year is to further develop content that is more specific to help students really save money, it’s been about a year and I hope to continue to offer unique and helpful content to university students.

Some things students should remember over the next year;

  • Despite how irritating budgeting can be develop some sort of one budget or make use of online resources to do so.
  • Review your previous spending habits from last year and get a good idea on what you did well and what categories had your highest amounts of spending. These are the places you can work on, or continue to excel in in order to save more money in 2013
  • Start thinking about summer jobs, yah I know its a jerk move on my part to even start mentioning that
  • Figure out how much money you will have to spend on tuition, books and other school related expenses and figure out employment accordingly. Do you need extra cash? Maybe find a part time job for next semester.
  • Do you want to try and reduce spending on credit and paying bills in full?

Long Term

These are some goals that need to be measurable, make sure that they are even possible as well. These goals could be related to a variety of topics

  • Amount of money you hope to have in your savings account by a certain date
  • When you want to start paying off your student loans and within what amount of time

It’s important to set goals, both long and short, I know personally as a student I tend to think much more day to day, which leads to surprises at the end of the month when you look at both your chequing account, savings account or your mastercard/visa bill. January is the time where everyone reflects on their year and tries to improve for the new year. Make sure your not one of those people that flakes out on their resolutions, it may not seem as important now, but once you graduate you might wish you had of kept your finances on track.