For the past couple of weeks I have been feeling a huge inspiration of saving money and finding ways to budget as a college student. While this method can be used for any lifestyle, whether you be married with kids, living with just your spouse, I found for me, this method works best as a broke college student, and I feel its more attainable. In this article I will be explaining the method of cash envelopes and how they have helped me immensely.
Cash envelopes can be simple, they can be your basic envelope with labels for each expense or they can be decorated how you want. For me, I decorated them with washi tape and stamps to make them fun to look at. Some cash envelope users use this envelopes to put away "monthly expenses," like rent, car payments or monthly subscriptions, but for me, I have been using them for this thing called "sinking funds"
My sinking funds consist of a few things like a trip I am planning for 2020, emergency gas fund, clothing/beauty fund, Christmas/birthday gift fund, and etc. There are envelopes I will build on every two weeks (each time I get paid) and put a fixed amount of money in them and log in how much I put.
I am an a crazy spender, or was, and never saved a penny, but now that I have been designating a fixed amount of money every two weeks into these envelopes I don't consider it money I can just spend, I consider it part of my savings.
As a college student that works two jobs, I am trying to improve on my finances and I want to be able to have more money long term and to actually be able to have the things I want without my week to week finances suffer.
My New Years resolution is to be better about saving money, and I hope this helps others, too!