I think budgeting and practical finances should be taught at multiple stages throughout a student’s life. I thought I knew the general idea but didn’t appreciate how much neglecting it would set me back.
What is your process for budgeting? As a starting point this article lists a few methods.
I use zero based budgeting where every dollar is assigned a purpose. I don’t end up sticking exactly to the plan, but I do keep a spreadsheet which lists my current balances and all expected expenses, so I can see my future balance and avoid going in the red. A couple times a month I cross off expenses which have been paid and update the balance. This is especially helpful to me because a big portion of my income is irregular month to month.
I don’t really budget, I live alone, and make enough money to support myself and live a decent life.
But I do have a few rules:
I will never set up any kind of subscription, be it media (HBO, Netflix, Disney+, Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal), apps (Flightradar24, Vesselfinder), games (Geoguessr). What I will do is buy prepaid cards with credit for those services, and activate them for a set period of time, but I will never buy into a recurring charge for a service, I have seen too many people ruining their economy with subscriptions being a big contributer.
I seldom give into impulse buying expensive stuff, but if I have the money and can afford it I am not against buying quallity even if it more expensive at first.
I don’t accept a seller or sales system stressing me out to buy as fast as possible, I can and have just walked away when I felt uncomfortable with how fast the sale if being pushed, I want to have time to think about if this thing is worth it for that price and if I need it now before I buy it.
You may want to see if your bank will let you create disposable cards. I have two credit cards where I can create temporary or reloadable cards at no charge for transactions.
So if I wanted to trial something, I would create a card with $1 on it. The trial starts and does the test transaction. I forget to cancel before the trial is over, but the card has no money so it automatically cancels.
If I wanted a subscription to HBO, I could create an HBO card and load the amount for it every month. When I cancel, I don’t have to worry that they’ll try to keep charging me because I just don’t add anything else to the card. It also makes me think about whether I’m using a service every month.
It saved me a few hundred bucks not terribly long ago. I tried a clothing subscription box that was absolutely terrible. So I contacted their customer service to cancel because they don’t have a real way to do it on their site. They didn’t get back to me in time and attempted to charge my card for another box. Luckily it was on the temp card and there was no cash on it so I just got a rejected charge on my card.
They used to allow that, but removed it in favour if having a switch to turn on and off internet access for the card, it is crap.
That’s just garbage.
Yep, it was an old system, I think it was flash based, which makes it understandable that they shut it off, but not that they didn’t replace it with an updated system.
What bank is it that lets you create temporary cards?
Capital One lets you do unlimited virtual cards for each service. X1 gives you the ones like I described. There are others.