If you’re currently a college student, you might have discovered that the bulk of your bills are centered around five major categories, ie, academic materials, transport, food, entertainment and phone bills. Here are five tips that you can try to help you reduce your expenses:

1) Share your food

Quite a few students survive on pizza. An alternative would be to buy groceries towards the end of the day at discounted prices and cook for your friends. The more students sharing the food, the less cost per person.

2) Minimise your transport expenses

Why do you require a vehicle to move around the college grounds when you can make use of a motorized scooter? Motorized scooters are getting very popular among college students and are a really cost effective form of transport. One of the more widely used scooters is the Razor E300 electric scooter. You don’t even need to pay for gas. If you’re not ready to convert to electricity just yet, you might want to take a look at the wide variety of gas powered scooters instead.

3) Buy and sell second hand material

When you’ve completed a course, don’t just dump your textbooks in a corner. Why not sell them to incoming students and get some cash back? You don’t have to buy new textbooks too, unless a new revision has just been released. Why not purchase second hand textbooks. Your college bulletin board could be a good starting point to start buying and selling. If what you are looking for is not available there, an online marketplace such as ebay might help.

4) Cut those phone expenses

If your college hostel comes with an internet connection, you could make use of a good messaging software such as Skype or msn instead. In the long run, the savings will be enormous, especially if you have friends and family overseas.

5) Always check if student discounts are available

You won’t believe the amount of money you can save if you make use of the student discounts available for a wide range of products and services. You can shop, eat, and purchase software, etc at greatly reduced prices if you know where to look.

Hopefully these 5 tips are of use to you to have a great time at college without needing to scrimp and save. Have fun!