Budgeting to live within your means reduces stress

One of the toughest things about going to college for the first time is managing your money. If you've never learned to budget you'd better start now.

Trying to live a champagne lifestyle on a shoestring is crazy. If you want your life to be as unstressful as possible, making your money stretch, and living within your means, is vital.

Once you have an acceptable college offer, one of the best things you can do is to sit down and work out a weekly budget for your year in college. This applies whether you'll be living at or away from home. (Don't forget to stick to the budget once you get to college.) If you're planning to move out of the family nest, rent is going to eat up the lion's share of your budget. According to figures supplied by DCU, you can expect to spend a whopping £240 per month on accommodation. On top of this, food will cost you around £140 each month, travel over £40, and books, academic requisites, clothes and medical expenses around £70.

Living at home is certainly cheaper, but going to college is bound to cost you money. At DCU, they reckon it's still going to cost you at least £300 monthly to go to college and live at home. Food - including eating at home - is likely to cost around £130, travel £40, and books, other academic requisites, clothes and medical expenses, £70 each month.

You'd be unwise to carry large amounts of cash around with you all day, so one of the first things you should do when you get to college is open a bank account. In fact, some experts recommend that you open two accounts - one for current expenditure and one for savings.

By depositing your grant or allowance immediately into a bank account you minimise your chances of spending all your money in one big splurge. If you have a part-time job you can probably organise to have your wages paid directly into your account, as well. It may seem a bit daft to be trying to save money when you're existing on a shoestring at college, but bankers advise that getting into the saving habit at an early stage will stand you in good stead in the future. As long as you're putting something away regularly for the proverbial rainy day, the amount doesn't really matter, they say.

If you're living at home, you may well have an easier time of it - particularly if you have affluent and generous parents on hand to dole out extra cash reserves as and when necessary.

Lots of students, though, are less fortunate and some even have to contribute to the family income while at college. For many families, finding the extra cash to keep a son or daughter at college is a huge financial drain. Costs have risen dramatically over the last two decades, but sadly, student maintenance grants have failed to keep pace.

According to Barry Kehoe, who is director of student services at DCU, inflation has increased by 121 per cent since the early 1980s. The student maintenance grant, however, has gone up by only 77 per cent.

This year, the full annual maintenance grant for students living away from home stands at £1,775.

Today, the bottom line is that very few students can afford to live on their grants - and they are forced to get extra cash from other sources - from parental subventions, by taking part-time jobs or by taking out top up loans or a mixture of all three. According to research conducted recently by Foresight Communications, almost 90 per cent of grant recipients at DIT find their grants inadequate. In order to maintain their lifestyles, just under three-quarters of DIT students are involved in part time work.

Disturbingly, well over one-third of these students are working over the recommended limit of 16 hours per week. Indeed, one in every ten students is working over 24 hours per week and some are even putting in more than 36 hours - on top, presumably, of their studies. Over half of the students say they work to survive, while most of the rest admit to working for social reasons.

Talk to the experts, and they'll tell you that, unlike students in the USA, you can't take up a third-level course in Ireland and expect to work your way through college. Courses here usually have to be completed within a specific timescale. Spending long hours in paid employment is detrimental to your studies and can damage your health. Spend half your time in a so called part-time job and the chances are you won't get the level of degree you're capable of - which could mean you'll miss out on a top job or the chance of doing postgraduate research.

If you are considering taking a part-time job to pay your way through college - the advice from the experts is - don't do too much. While only 14 per cent of the DIT students surveyed admit to missing class due to work almost two-thirds cite tiredness as the main reason for skipping lectures. While some of this tiredness is undoubtedly due to having too much of a good time, a lot must surely have to do with part-time work.