For my non-academic campus resource, I went to a one hour session of financial coaching. Of course, this is a private matter so I can not post a picture, but this coaching session has really helped me when it comes to managing my money and having a proper budget to last me the rest of the semester. One of the reasons as to why I chose financial coaching for my non-academic campus resource is because I’ve been noticing people use all of their given money on food instead of having a sustainable way of eating, and I did not want to run out of the money that the University has given me because there is always a chance that I won’t get money from any other sources for a long while, and if I truly run out at that point, there’s not much I can do to fix it. One thing we talked about in financial coaching was how often I eat because that often becomes the biggest money drainer for many students, and I am no different. Since I don’t eat very often, my coach told me that we can either save that topic for last or just make it a small amount compared to the total amount that I have, and then come back to it later. I decided to make it a small amount for now rather than have nothing planned for it, in case the time ran out. After talking about the food expenses, we moved onto hygiene-based purchases, such as soap and lotion. Since I shower every day, and one big box of soap can last me over a month and a half, soap wasn’t an issue. Lotion, shampoo, hair products, and toothpaste were also included in this category, and thus my budgeting for this was about $60.00 per semester. Next, there were the traveling expenses, but since I do not have a car, bike, or any other vehicle, this would just be $0 for me. After that, we talked about cleaning products such as laundry detergent and dryer sheets. These kinds of products are relatively cheap compared to the actual hygiene-based purchases because they last somewhat longer due to me not using them every day, but since the number of times I was my clothes vary on how impactful that wash may be, this amount also started small and would soon work it’s way up. Lastly, I came back to the eating expenses. I agreed with just using my swipes most of the time, and so I only budgeted about $15 a week, and then the laundry detergent purchases came out to around $30 a semester. Overall, I ended with about $50 to myself if I stuck to this budget, give or take about 10 dollars too.
Overall, the financial coaching session was very useful in the sense that now I am confident that I will not run out of money over the semester as long as I stick to my budget. This will also help me succeed in the future because now I know how to budget my money. The only thing to do now is to stick to my budget and make sure everything works out.