The credit crunch is now over a year old and, as its recent annihilation of a few rather large banks, mortgage lenders and travel company behemoths shows, clearly smells blood. Who’s next? It could be coming for you, dear student.
So, how is one to cope with the dreaded crunch? Here are gair rhydd’s helpful tips to ensure that the legion of evil, avaricious City bankers, fiddling around with hordes of imaginary money and then running to the state they have always urged to leave them alone when they get in trouble, like tiny hypocritical pig-tailed girls, don’t affect you any more than is absolutely necessary.
1. A great variety of maintenance grants, hardship grants, bursaries, scholarships, special support grants and awards are available alongside your student loan. A huge proportion of students are simply unaware of the financial support available to them. Don’t be one of them – www.direct.gov.uk/en/educationandlearning.
2. With food prices rising, sacrifices in shopping habits must be made. Previously sacrosanct axioms such as the classic, ‘Don’t ever buy meat from Lidl’ rule, much like Gordon’s formerly coveted ‘golden’ rule on borrowing and anti-monopoly regulations, may have to be torn up. Also, stock up on cheap and filling foods such as pasta, crumpets and potatoes. Fruit is cheap, filling and healthy. If all else fails, buy food you really hate so that it lasts for ages.
3. If you are really struggling for enough pennies to cover essentials such as food and electricity and heating, set yourself little challenges to provide incentive for continued thrift. For how many meals in a row can you eat beans on toast? Can you talk to your friends in the dark for over three hours? Is it possible to wear eight layers of clothes and subsequently sleep in snug comfort with no heating on in the depths of a Cardiff winter?
4. When planning a night on the town, if possible, buy your favourite tipple in bulk – or as a group. Drink most of the booze you plan to consume before leaving the house. If you drink enough, you may fall asleep before hitting the pub or the club – saving yet more money. Additionally, avoid Bar Risa. There are no economic reasons for this, but a multitude of sociological, psychological and theological ones.
5. Don’t go out at all except for lectures. Learn to love root beer (cheap root beer). Read a book. Watch a film. That Brad Pitt is actually really good. And look! There’s that guy from Changing Rooms! What’s he doing in a film? Oh wait, that’s not actually him. It’s some other guy. Never mind.
6. Avoid love. Fact: paramours mean pounds. Aside from the incrementally-increasing costs of birthday presents and Christmas presents and anniversary presents as a relationship trundles on, you will also be expected to occasionally buy your squeeze drinks and meals – and possibly even little presents ‘just to show you care’. Unfortunately, a partner is simply not fiscally sustainable in the current financial climate. If encumbered with such a cash-drain, dispense forthwith.
7.Don’t buy greetings cards. Greetings cards – aside from perhaps cinema pick-and-mix and popcorn – are the most overpriced and overrated products on the market. That’s four quid you’re paying. For a bit of paper that someone looks at once and then, at best, puts in a drawer and forgets about forever. Buy a second-hand book (two pound), write a message in the front and then give that instead. It’ll be put on the recipient’s bookshelf and they’ll look at it in twenty years and think, “Ah that’s nice, so and so bought me a book. What a wonderful person.” Lovely. And, most crucially, you’ve saved two precious pounds.
