Monthly Archives: June 2020

The Best “At Home” Jobs For Students Who Don’t Want COVID Exposure

Best “At Home” jobs For Students

For half of us, working from home is ideal. Whether this is because you’re an unsociable person or because working in retail just isn’t worth the risk of COVID, self-sufficiency is important. The reality of getting a job during a pandemic and economic instability isn’t great, but the outlook on working from home is actually looking up.

Here are the 10 best jobs you can do from home this summer:

1.   Tutoring

With schools being closed, many parents will be looking to home-school their children. To keep them brushed up on their Maths, Economics or whatever it may be, paying a tutor for online classes is their go-to option right now. Or, if you’re looking to teach English, parents in China pay a very handsome sum – but beware, the hours are odd.

2.   Content Writer

There’s always content to be written, no matter the political or sociological climate. The beauty of content writing is that it can be for any student, no matter what they’re studying. Your best bet is to try and get started on Upwork, and then contact businesses and outlets directly after having built up a portfolio.

3.   Customer Service

Given that most businesses have turned to working from home, even more customer interaction is done online at the moment. This is why there are so many opportunities to work in online customer service, such as answering customers on the Live Chat, or on emails or even social media. Pay usually isn’t very high, but then the work isn’t very hard…

4.   Video Editor

If you have great video editing skills or animation experience, then freelance work is a great option. This market is only growing, particularly because social media (Youtube in particular) is being watched even more due to lockdown. There are lots of medium-sized channels out there looking for extra editing support, and pay a fair amount.

5.   Programming and IT

Programming is an extremely general term, but it’s included because the opportunities are also a wide net. Money will be made from whatever you’re good at. Backend developers and database engineers will get better money and have less competition than front end, but you’re best off checking for yourself. Type the language or software that you’re an expert in to Fiverr or Upwork and see what kind, how many, and what pay the job posts that arise are.

6.   Virtual Assistant

There are a lot of virtual Assistant jobs online, and all you need for them is some general, basic IT skills as well as good soft skills. You’ll often get at least the US minimum wage for sending emails, data entry and other basic admin tasks.

7.   Translation work

If you’re fluent in two or more languages, then you’re almost guaranteed to be able to find some translation work. The pay can vary, but this is a good way to keep on top of your writing or speaking skills in both languages. Plus, if you’re fast at reading and typing, you can earn good money. If you’re not bilingual, you can still make money transcribing English audio. You have to be a fast and accurate touch typist, but you can easily make $20 per hour.

8.   Start a website and create a brand

If you’re able to do almost any of the above, or perhaps you’re just looking to start a blog, then creating a website and branding it is a fantastic use of time. It doesn’t matter if you’re trying to sell writing services, photographs, programming, tutoring… Building up a following on social media and developing a website will be an exercise in SEO, branding, and many other skills that will look great on your CV — and maybe you can start monetizing it within a few months.

9.   Drop Serving

If you’re entrepreneurially inclined, there’s certainly some opportunities in dropshipping. It’s like Drop Shipping, only not with physical products. So, when you receive payment on your website for services, such as web building or graphic design, you outsource the work to someone else — so you’re just the middleman. It takes some time setting up, but it can scale much larger than the other options.

10. Rent out what you’re not using

Okay, so this is only one that isn’t a “job” per se, but it’s a good money-making opportunity. There’s plenty of things that Coronavirus has put an abrupt end to, and these are the things you could be renting out. For example, public transports have been mostly put on hold, and you’re likely not using your car much right now — so why not rent it out? Likewise, you can also rent out your parking space too.

At the end of the day, it will heavily depend on what skills you have and what you’re studying for. The best paid jobs will be skill-specific, so you’re best off leveraging what you’re studying for and try to work freelance (i.e. web developer, bookkeeper, graphic designer, and so on).

How to Create a Simple Budget While in College and to Tweak it so it Will Fit ME

create a simple budget

Every student could benefit from a budget. When in college, money is a particularly scarce resource, as is your time. Working side jobs can be difficult, and working too many hours will only compromise your grades. Whilst you need enough to survive, a better way to look at it might be how to reduce your spending rather than how to earn more money. Afterall, money-making can be done once your degree is in your hands.

Budgets are the best way to achieve this. Following a spending plan can help minimize debt and overspending on less-than-necessary things. It may even lead to mindset differences, such as becoming more minimal and more appreciative of the smaller things in life.

The problem with researching the topic of budgeting

The issue is that everyone’s circumstances are different. Finding budgets online is a nightmare. Templates are an issue because they will likely consist of a bunch of things that you don’t have, like mortgage repayments and rental income. Whilst you can adapt them, you will have to add in things specific to you as well as remove items (and perhaps whole sections). The process is kind of pointless.

What’s more important is to really understand your own situation and spending patterns, and then making a budget from scratch, bespoke to you, will not take very long. Plus, filling in manually every type of spending that you have might be a wake-up call that’s needed.

How to create your own budget

Creating a budget doesn’t have to take long. In fact, it can be done in an afternoon with just a few steps. If you have more time to spare though, you can add in some extras (step 5) that will make your life easier and enhance the effectiveness of the budget.

Step 1: Income

The first step is to determine what your income is. This is easier to calculate than your spending, so it comes first. It should be a relatively steady number: living cost loan income, income from working, parental help, and so on. Find out what your income will be for the near future, or until the end of college if possible. Of course, use your after-tax income here for simplicity, unless you have a small business in which you want to track expenses within this same budget.

Step 2: Track spending

This isn’t about guessing what things you’re likely to buy next month, this is about tracking what you actually buy. The issue with forecasting items is that you’re prone to underestimating. Things constantly pop up, whether it’s getting college books or new clothes. It’s best to just track what you actually spend for a couple of months, then you’ll know for sure what the average month looks like. 

This doesn’t have to mean delaying your budget creation either. You can literally just open up your bank statements and reconcile them. Go through and write a note next to each spending. Even if you can only identify 75% of them, this means that you will need less time tracking them physically, meaning you can get started sooner.

Step 3: Goals

The point of a budget isn’t the budget itself, it’s to better reach a goal. Think carefully about why you want a budget. Is it so you can pay off more of your college debt? Is it to save up for a 6-month traveling experience? Whatever it is, write down a handful of meaningful goals.

SMART goals are best, too. This means making them specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-based. For example, a poor goal would be to “have lots of savings in the future”. A better goal would be, “build a $4,000 emergency fund by July 2021”.

The reason this is step 3 and not 2 is because “track spending” is a function of goal-setting. In other words, your goals must take into account of your spending. It’s impossible to completely turn your spending on its head and set unrealistic goals. 

Step 4: Set parameters

This is the fun/daunting part; the budget itself. Now that you have an idea of what you actually spend, and what your fixed, unavoidable costs are, you can start to set parameters on your variable costs. 

If you have optimistic goals though, don’t shy away from being ruthless on your fixed costs. For example, running a car may seem like an unavoidable fixed cost, but you should think carefully about whether it really is. 

Most college students live close to or inside the campus. Having a bicycle may be the more healthy, environmentally friendly lifestyle choice that could save thousands per year.

Step 5: The spreadsheet itself

Now that you’ve created your budget, you want to represent it on a spreadsheet effectively. Downloading templates and copying them is one way to do this, but alternatively, you can play around with it yourself and learn some valuable Excel skills.

For example, you may want to use conditional formatting to change the colors of the cells depending on their value. This is how you make your balance appear in red when it goes below zero, for example.

Likewise, you want to set borders around sections, instead of having prose of messy information. You could use different pages for different sections too, and have the main page that represents and pulls in all the data together.

If you want an easier way to input data into the sheet (i.e. input each purchase you make as you go), then you can make use of forms. Google forms (inputted into Google Sheets) are an easy way to do this — you simply make a small Q&A where you type in the data and hit enter. This will be submitted to the budget. The link to the form can even be placed on your mobile home screen.

Lastly, formulas are important to learn too. It doesn’t have to be complicated, but you want to automate the calculations as much as possible so there are few mistakes. “=SUM” will perhaps be your most used formula.