Budgeting Sucks...

No one really likes to budget, especially me. But as students we have a limit on how much we can do with our money. Savings from over the summer plus, grant/ loan money and maybe the part-time job is all we have to keep us going for a year.

Personally, I’m going to start of budgeting for each week even if budgeting each month will save me more money; I’m one to spend, not save.

I had been thinking of doing a budgeting blog post for a while (but it seemed too hard), so when SaveTheStudent.org asked me to one - I had more motivation to actually do it.

Second Year

As a second year I:

• Can’t control my rent and my utility bills will vary month to month – which throws a spanner in the work.
• Have to cut back on my nights out due to my very hectic schedule this year. (A lovely looking fourth year told me to go out as much as I can at the start of the year because second year gets hard and gets hard fast. A hint for all you first years’.)
• Save money on travelling into university as I can now walk it in.
• Will be doing all my food shopping online to resist the temptation of getting snacks.
• Must only buy things that I can justify on; my best examples of this is when I go out shopping and come across something I want (i.e. a dress), I think of all the possible reasons for buying it and how much I will use it. If I have up to 5 good, proper reasons: Dress = bought. 
• Made myself a money jar to save up for my placement year in 2012. All those coins must add up over time… 
• Am trying to find myself a job…

Breakdown

Money coming in: My loan comes in every term, money saved from working over the summer and a lovely overdraft.

Money going out: clubbing (incl. taxi’s to and from, entry fees, drinks), food (incl. alcohol), rent, bills, travelling home, getting snacks on campus.

Goals

I’ve also decided to have goals this year. It just means that I know for myself what I’ll try to cut back on.

1. Trying not to spend much while on campus. A very limited budget of £4/ a meal deal a day – or rather, just under £10 a week. 

2. Food. I personally, cannot get my food shopping bill right. I try but I always fail. So I want a limit of £30 for two weeks’ worth of food, and that will include alcohol.

3. To spend a maximum of £20 on a night out. But before you gasp on whether you think that’s high or low, this covers my taxi’s (to and from), pre-drinks, entrance fees, and for that very drunken night, a cheeky subway.

4. To allow myself 4 takeaways a month (gasp!). Yes, this does mean the cheeky drunken subway too. 

5. Beauty/ clothes: to spend under £30 a month on all things beauty and clothes.

So, I plan ahead.

Budget for week commencing (10/10/11 – 16/10/11):

Monday – Campus – 70p

Tuesday – Campus – £0-4

Wednesday – Beauty – £5, clubbing – £20

Thursday – Campus – £0-4

Friday – Campus – £0-4/ travelling back home – £5/ Meal out – £30

Saturday – Clubbing – £40 (including pre-drinks, drinks out, entry fee)/ Travel – £10

Sunday – £0

= +/- £100

Real Budget:

Monday – Campus: 70p

Tuesday – University supplies: £3/ Drinks out: £5

Wednesday – Travel, beauty, food, clubbing: £30/ TV license: £24

Thursday – Campus: £0

Friday – Meal/ Travel: £30

Saturday – Travel: £5.30

Sunday – Meal: £10

=  £106… (oops)

Analysis

Looking back on the week, I spend most of my money on nights out but I already knew that.

I shouldn’t have spent that £5 on Wednesday on food (chocolate, tissues, fish fingers, milk) and I won’t have to think about the TV license again

Saturday was my most expensive night out because it was a birthday so I won’t be doing that again for a while which also means that I can justify it.

You know, this budgeting thing might just work out after all….

Survival of a University Student =) Tweet

My Event (part. 2)

Our event is over and done with, now a couple of weeks ago I gave you a low down on my 90’s themed event and here is my newest post telling everything that it’s over!

The 90’s night was, thankfully, a huge success – even though we were up against Bedlam – and now here is my chance to actually give you in full detail how this night came about.

According to my group mate, this idea came about by watching the Spice Girls on a laptop and from getting very excited about our childhood and what we remembered from it, Voila! The 90’s night was born – under the original name of “Death of Pop!” It was meant to celebrate the year that Pop died… but as time went on and the confusion of others, the name changed to “I <3 Pop”. Unfortunately, this had to change again to the final “Saturday Night – born in the 90’s.” Expressing the Whigfield classic (don’t act as though you don’t know the dance…) as well as giving the obvious information about the event, it was going to be held on a Saturday and of course, born in the 90’s the main theme.

Promotion and marketing went hand in hand together and for our event our main aim was to bring back nostalgia to students. We bought rainbow dust, ultra violets and lollipop sweets as a giveaway when handing out leaflets.

We held a promotion day with a gazebo in the middle of our university campus blasting out very cheesy tunes from the gym next to us and with hand-made t-shirts (made by our very own marketing manager and her boyfriend) spent most of the day handing out flyers and dancing along to tunes (see pictures). I’m not going to lie to you, I would like to say everyone got involved but it was just me handing out flyers… everyone else was cold and it was freeeeezing!!

We had 8.45am starts handing out flyers at the gate to university, promotion flyerring on the various club nights held at our venue and every night selling tickets at the university halls.

Then, came getting people to come. Now, as we all know, Saturday is a day of doing nothing for the fellow student and we are rarely seen out on a Saturday, unless it’s a house party or there is something ‘Student special’ going on, or, you have money and like a Saturday night out. So, when the news that it was a ‘Reading week’ for a lot of students (which means a week of students all going home) did frustrated us, especially when our whole group trekked around all of halls to sell tickets (myself and a group member getting escorted out because it was deemed as “business” – don’t worry we talked to the warden the next day and she let us come back in).

We had 300 tickets available at the Student Union shop, 100 online and then another 100 or so with us at all times. We hardly sold any tickets with a week and a bit to go. We were stressing, plus, it didn’t help that our lecturers were starting to worry too.

But not to fear, we knew that like a Friday night out most students only ever bought tickets a day or two before the event and most of them would probably get them on the door. However, for our event we had hardly sold 300 in the student union shop two days before our event. Everyone would pop into the shop to ask how many were left or constantly refresh the online ticket page just in case it ever went down.

As luck and life would have it, Thursday saw us go down to 50 tickets online and we put another 100 up by 1pm that day – it did annoy us at first because, naturally we wanted it to go down to a lot less before we put more up, but by that evening it had gone down to under 100 which resulted in us having to put more up on Friday when we realised we had sold just about 400 tickets.

By 8pm on Saturday, our group could only put just under 100 tickets online. Can you believe our luck – I couldn’t explain how it all happened from selling just over 200 on a Wednesday to the Saturday being able to say that throughout the day our total had risen to 700!?

We had spent Saturday dragging our friends/ boyfriends who had come down for the day, redecorating the whole of the club in bright neon cut-out words, CDs, 90’s CD cases and bright coloured cassettes. V.I.P sections decorated with sweets, our brilliant posters and pictures of the 90’s.

Leaving the venue at 5.30pm and coming back for 8.30pm we waited anxiously for our first lecturer to assess us and that was even before everyone else turned up! Thankfully, she was overly impressed with our group – I have to admit, truthfully, we do get on together really well, because we all wanted the same thing - for the event to be a success. If there were ever anything we weren’t happy about, we could always talk about it.

So imagine, 800 of your peers once hearing the song that was a big hit, everyone knew the words to because it was a guy and a girl speaking about a popular girls toy (huge hint)… would you say that everyone erupted with joy and screams and shouts or that everyone turned their head in disgust?

Because if you wanted to go for the latter; you wouldn’t have come to our event. Every so often a classic song would come on and everyone would erupt with excitement! It was crazy!!

Unfortunately again for our group, we couldn’t drink and though we enjoyed the night we couldn't exactly go out on the dance-floor and boogie on down like we desperately wanted to.

By the time our second and final lecturer came to us, it was 1.30am – yes! I’m being serious – I was the one in charge of showing him around the venue and keeping him entertained until he left. There was no way I could not dance to Take That – Never Forget and out-right told my lecturer that I simply loved this song there was no way I could'’t put my hands up when the chorus came on. My lecturer however did not mind at all claiming that the 1990’s were his Master years and he would go out clubbing to the 1990’s music. Result! He even volunteered to come to our event.

He left at 2.15am. Champagne hit our table at 2.19am.

The night ended to us hugging, chanting in joy and congratulating ourselves. We had pulled off a sell-out event!

I’m not going to say that I went to bed that night exhausted but happy but tired and I collapsed in bed with a smile on my face. OH NO! I came back to my house – everyone asleep from already been and gone to my event – shouting at how great my event was. I walked into my bedroom my best friend who had come down just for me in my bed sleeping – I woke her up screaming at how well my event had been, how my lecturers had said to me congratulations to me and was very happy with his stay!!

I WANTED TO SCREAM ABOUT IT! I WANTED TO JUMP ABOUT AND TALK AND TALK AND TALK!!

I had even driven my cab driver crazy talking to him about what he had done, how it had gone and the wreck the venue was after everyone had left.

It was surreal over the next couple of days where our peers are still organising and stressing about their events yet to be put on and ours was over and done with!

The next meeting with our client was the most anticipated… he loved what we did, he came down to see our event and was astonished at the outcome, and more than that, he wanted us to do it again!

Us, second year events students, and a real client wanting us to recreate our event again so more people can come, more profit, more 90’s!

Our client had said to us that he was already going to make profit with his bar sales so the ticket sale profit could go to us. We were almost at the point of fainting we were so happy!

And that’s where our story gets a little confusing because, most of the second year events are for charity and the profit made would go straight to them. But this was different and even though our client said we could keep the money – University laughed at the idea; of course we couldn’t keep the money it’s the clients!

So we’ve been pushing to have the profit of the ticket sales invested into the next event – which is what our client suggested.

Its' not our fault and it's not exactly my university's fault either. According to our client, any of the events that have been put on at this particular venue has never made enough profit to cover its budget. So, this has never happened before - which we all need to take on board as a huge compliment - however, we're all still buzzing off this amazing news and this amazing night that we organised and ran as successfully as we could. We've had heated discussions with administrators who is completely clueless and because we are too - we're all going around in circles because they are leaning towards giving all of our profit away to charity – which is all well and good but not when we can half that money to invest and the other half to a chosen charity of ours.

We've got to wait until Monday so she can figure out what is best. From the talk I had with her, the profit that was made is wholly the clients and so what they do with it is completely up to them. Which then makes us say – then why can’t we have it, because he said he could have it!? But as a university, again, they’re saying “oh my! Oh no! Of course you can’t have it for yourselves…” but then they get stumped… to which we want the rest of that sentence and they can’t give it to us. Legal stuff, contracts, permission etc., it’s all in the way.

So we wait until Monday.

If you wanted to ask me what I learnt from this, it would be that I really think I can do this as my profession. Which sometimes as students I think that’s hard to say. We study a degree in something we like and are good at, something we are interested in but really it’s not what we see ourselves doing in fifteen years’ time. But as an event management course, it’s not something you can just say that you didn’t want to do for the rest of your life because it’s not that kind of course; it’s like a marriage or I guess, more permanently, a tattoo. As well, it’s your personality as I think event managers as much as they can be taught – it’s a hard profession to get into and the person has to be willing to do it.

So what I’ve learnt is that, I cannot wait to do this event again with some great people and hopefully with some money to help us. I’ve learnt to overcome my fear of being in charge of finance  and even though, I’m very slow with numbers and it takes a while to get my head around calculations etc., etc., I think, personally, I’ve done really well in keeping it all together and working out everything in a way that everyone can understand and not lose any money!

I’m overwhelmed at how well we have actually done, I had given up hope of a sell-out event (even though I made a £5 bet that it would), I was happy with about 350 people so we could break even. And I guess as well, for university to know what to do if this sort of situation ever happens again.

That, all our effort, our good team work and just the hard work and thought process we put into every single detail of the event, paid off in such a exploded way that has seemed to dumbfounded everyone; us, the client, our university and now it’s all about how we can all go about this in the correct way that we all win.

Survival of a University Student =) Tweet