Budgeting and Part-Time work

It’s really important to know your typical monthly spending habits. It’s hard to just estimate in your head as there’s a lot to be unaccounted for especially If you don't have experience living on your own yet. It’s good to spend a few months tracking your spending to figure out what your spending is. You could create a quick excel spreadsheet to do this. Before the year starts, you should figure out what necessary spending would you have, here are some usual ones:
1. Rent: In the Kingston area, usually it’s somewhere in between £500-1000 a month.
2. Paid either monthly or in a few instalments if you are living in student accommodation.
3. Tuition
4. Utilities: a lot of housing would have utilities included but if not, you can usually expect water(£20/month), Electricity (£40-80/month) and Wi-Fi
5. Food
6. Travel
7.Extra spending (Clothes, fun, gifts, miscellaneous... etc)

You should work out how much money you can spend every month and still have some money left over and out of that, how much are things that can be cut out and how much cannot be cut out. If the spending number is a little higher than your budget (money from parents, Maintenace loan or savings), you could consider getting a part time job.

There’s not much advice I can give in this section because everyone's situation is different so I can only give two tips.

Tip one: Try to work for your university! They hire many students every year and they would work around your hours. A lot of uni students have unpredictable schedules, and the uni allows you to work around this.

Tip two: Try to work in your field. And be creative! A friend of mine is studying nutrition and wants to be a professional nutrition/sports coach and he’s working at a football club, and he’s able to make connections there. A forensic friend (This is a morbid one) is working as a receptionist at a nursing home - her reasoning during the job interview was that if a resident is suddenly passes away, she wouldn’t freak out and would be able to keep herself calm, and that’s the thing her interviewer valued and she got the (pretty well paying for a uni student) job. Be creative during the job search! It's good for your CV and your wallet. Biomed? Butchers' assistant! Pharmacy? Boots (okay that one isn’t so creative but it was the beginning my aunt’s cancer research career). Child psychology? Summer camps hire a lot of seasonal works!

Go to your uni’s career centre, they have a lot of fun ideas.

What part time jobs have you done?

Best, Maddie (Kingston Rep)

(edited 2 months ago)