The College Info Geek is a weekly podcast that offers practical advice for students about studying, managing your finances, and tips on being an adult. This lively podcast, hosted by YouTuber Thomas Frank and web developer Martin Boeh, seeks to empower college and high school students by providing them with knowledge and resources to succeed. Every episode, they include notes on their podcast website along with timestamps and at the end of every video, there is a recap in case you only have time for the SparkNotes version.
I listened to Episode 235, “How to Fix Your Spending Problem” and here are some of the things I learned.
In this episode, they discussed a list of ten tips for curbing your bad spending habits. These tips ranged from avoiding impulse purchases to ignoring sales of items you didn’t intend to buy, and from limiting expensive social outings with friends to watching your subscription lists.
They started the episode by discussing manual expense tracking. Martin stated that it is important to know how you are spending your money and why you are spending it. He specifically mentioned the iOS app Daily Budget as a tool to manage your spending money. It allows users to see how much money they can spend daily after subtracting bills from their income. Furthermore, it calculates how much spending money you’ll have tomorrow if you don’t spend today which promotes saving.
Martin admits that he doesn’t always do this, but it can be a helpful tool for seeing which fields need to be budgeted more. He suggests even using notes to budget your worst spending habit and manage your weakness.
Similarly, Thomas revealed that he looks for patterns in his bank statement that highlight his problem areas. Seeing which items suck up your money, such as that daily Starbucks latte and bacon sandwich, makes you more conscious of your unnecessary expenses.
