Speaker 1: Hello, I am James, my pronouns are he, him and I am from the University of York and I study International Relations. Today's vlog is going to be about budgeting and how to manage your finances. I have divided this vlog into three sections, it is the three most important sections I think that you need to be concerned about when you think about budgeting. All I can say now is I hope you enjoy the vlog. Thank you post-productive James. Now I am in my hometown of Leicester but do not worry, the information I'm going to give you applies to any town or most towns in the UK and especially York. So come and join me and we will talk about budgeting. The first thing I recommend about food shopping is that, you know, in the early days of uni go to a lot of the shops to see which things you buy the most and find the places that sell the most cheapest things. So that's the main important thing, get like a tally if you like of the things that are cheaper in other shops or, you know, more expensive than others so you will know which shops to go to for which certain items. Another big thing is to avoid small supermarkets because they're usually for convenience and therefore the prices are higher. I therefore recommend you go to the big supermarkets because things are usually cheaper there and more affordable. The next big one that I really cannot stress enough is get the unbranded or the shop's brands food because it is so much more cheaper than, you know, the branded stuff. These things include like crisps, soft drinks and cereal, they're the three things that come to mind. Evan. What are you doing? That's not branded. Stop it. Don't go. So I know people usually complain about unbranded stuff because they don't think it's as good as the branded ones but to be honest it is significantly cheaper and it's not that bad if I'm honest, like, it's alright. The last thing I recommend is that you get a loyalty card or like a point system with the shops and these can be on a number of apps that they provide so that over time you can accumulate, you know, discounts and coupons and that sort of thing so you can further save more money. Here I'm going to put in a small subtopic about catered students. A little sort of student hack that I can give you for that then is you are not provided lunch in a catered accommodation but if you're not too hungry in the morning or you're not feeling like it, I recommend still go to breakfast and pick some items that you can like sort of take back to your flat and have for lunch. I have made a vlog on the Uni York Vlogs channel about catered accommodation if you'd like to go watch that. At the gallery you get two meals a day, it's included in your rent so you don't have to pay. Yeah, okay, that's enough of that. Off the bat I would say don't always use the Trainline app because, you know, the Trainline app has an admin fee so, I mean, yeah, sometimes it's necessary to use it and I still recommend it but I would also recommend downloading the individual apps that the train companies have, you know, the individual company apps because they don't have admin charges and you can usually get it for, you know, the same rate with no sort of added on charges. The next thing I recommend is obviously, you know, book your train tickets well in advance because the prices do really skyrocket near the time of travel. Three million pounds. Another great thing for students is to get yourself a rail card, a 16 to 25 rail card is about £70, I think, for three years and it gives you a third off all rail tickets so it's really good. Once again, if you don't get a rail card you might have a shock when you buy your ticket. You might have got four million pounds. Always see or ask whether a restaurant, a shop or anything has student discount. Now at York you do get a student card so if you hand it in to shops or places that will be accepted as a discount. For instance in Leicester there's the Richard III Museum, I brought in my, you know, student card from York and they did give me a discount which was really nice. We have Richard III, do you have Richard III? No, but there's plenty of good museums in York, it's fine, don't worry. We tried asking in the restaurant where we went for lunch but unfortunately we had very little luck, but it was still good anyway. Like I was saying about the food shopping where you should go to all shops to see which products are cheap depending on what you want to buy, I recommend you do the same for things like cinemas since, you know, different cinemas charge different prices so it's always good to see which one is the cheapest. I recommend that you go and look for deals and, you know, coupons again as I was saying about the food. For instance some shops allow you to have McDonald's vouchers, you know, so you can go to McDonald's and have either a free meal or a reduced rate so that's always good to accumulate those if you just want, you know, a quick bite to eat. And another one is as students I'm sure we're going to spend a lot of time in coffee shops, you know, studying. I recommend that you can go and get one of those loyalty cards where they can stamp it and, you know, you can accumulate it to have a free coffee. Anyway, I hope this vlog has helped you on budgeting in general and how to manage your finances and see you in the next vlog. Bye.