When you decide on partying hard on Friday nights, you get quite worried about checking into your bank account the next day, because sometimes your money just disappears (God knows how?). Therefore, I decided on sharing some of the tips and opportunities that I have used to ease money related scarcities during studies.
Everybody has a certain amount of budget at the beginning of every semester when they come from home. So my first tip is quite simple on managing your budget. You simply count the number of days that you have to survive on your current budget up until the period when you receive your usual income and divide your current money in hand by the number of those days. This will simply indicate your daily expenditure allowance so you know how much can you spend each day. In addition, if you have exceeded your limit during one of the days it is an indicator for you to conserve spending during the upcoming days (depending on the amount you have overspent). You can keep track of your expenses in a simple excel spreadsheet on your computer.
My second advice would rather help you on increasing your budget. If you are an active student with high-performance level, there is a high chance for you to obtain scholarships or stipend. The University of Tartu offers achievement stipends which are basically given to students with relatively high grades and active participation in extracurricular activities. You can try your luck there. Nonetheless, there are lots of scholarship opportunities that are being emailed to the students by the University almost every month. One scholarship that I remember very vividly was the “Eco-innovation scholarship” where students that truly cared about the environment were chosen.
However, if you are not fond of such procedures and would want to receive some cash on point, I guess the best choice is going to the city center of Tartu and asking for daily paid jobs in some of the restaurants or cafes. I have not personally tried this but some of my friends succeeded and even got their pays on the first day of the job. You will be surprised on how much you might get paid working in your free hours.
My favorite and the easiest way of quickly obtaining money would probably be finding some old and useless items that you have in your dorms/apartments and selling them on the internet. Probably the most popular media among students in Tartu that can help you with such trading is the “Flea Market Tartu” page on Facebook.
Lastly, I would strongly recommend all the students on learning how to control your expenditures as an individual very wisely. It might seem ridiculous to some of you to keep such strict control of your money when you are just a student. However, with time you learn the sense of responsibility with money which will reflect as a positive quality when you are managing your own business as an entrepreneur or are balancing your finances based on income from work.
