Reducing living expenses

One word: 2-ply

Melissa Hiebert Staff

Attending university while living on your own can get to be costly. Why work endless hours trying to cover your expenses when you could just as easily save money in other areas? Here are a few ways to make sure that you have enough cash to get you through the month without selling your kidneys on EBay or holding numerous bake sales.

The first thing you can do is get rid of unnecessary services. If you have a cell phone and a house phone, you might want to consider dropping one of them. You also might want to consider unhooking your cable; there are better things to do than watch television all day anyway. You can still pick up the basic channels, and you can always watch a movie. If you are really in need of some extra cash, you could always decide to disconnect your Internet as well, and make use of the computers around campus.

Instead of buying all of your meals at school or ordering takeout for dinner every night, you can save a ton of money by simply making your own food. Some really cheap yet delicious meals include three-bean chili with buns, homemade soup, and crepes. Also, bring snacks and a water bottle to school instead of buying food and drinks from the vending machine.

There are a lot of free things to do for fun around Winnipeg if you look hard enough. Events like the Fringe Festival have free outdoor shows and a ton of street performers. There are often good bands playing in bars that have a one-time membership fee or no cover charge. Watch out for special discounts or “buy one, get one free” admissions to museums and art galleries. Wait until movies come out at Cinema City rather than at a more expensive venue, and catch matinees instead of evening shows. Also, instead of renting movies or buying books, borrow them from the public library.

Naturally, you can buy a lot of your furniture and clothing second hand at garage sales, thrift stores or through classified ads. However, you can even get some of these items for free by talking to people you know. Often people will just give away their old couches, dishes or other household items, so they might as well give them to you. You can hold a clothing swap with your friends or even trade books, movies or other unwanted items. Most friends will also be happy to lend you other things that you may need.

You may also want to consider keeping a budget of exactly how much you spend (and on what) in a month, and what you earn. This will also help you put things into perspective and see how much money you spend on unnecessary things. It will be hard to justify spending $50 on shoes when you could have bought a week’s worth of groceries instead. It will even be harder to imagine working a seven-hour day just to pay for them when you could have been out with your friends or at home sleeping.

The most important thing is just cutting back on anything that is not really necessary. If you smoke, you might want to consider quitting. Taking the bus or biking is a much cheaper mode of transportation than a car. You can even keep a jar handy to put loose change in, and dip into that once in a while whenever you want to treat yourself. So instead of working so much that you don’t even have time to enjoy the fruit of your labours, cut back, relax and enjoy life.