So last time we talked about whether going back to school was right for you as an individual. Today we’re going to talk about something that’s right for pretty much all of you on some level: making money while you’re in school…and managing that money once you’ve made it.

First things first, let’s talk about making money! I know, exciting stuff. You have my permission to cheer, if you’d like. 🙂

To be clear, I’m not going to talk about scholarships, grants, or loans here, nor am I going to talk about the major financial needs of college students: tuition, room, and board. These areas deserve their own article, for one thing, but moreover they are obvious enough that every current or prospective college student will have them covered somehow or they won’t be going to college in the first place. The money I’m talking about is your “walking around money,” the money you make not because you HAVE to, but because you WANT to. Will you use some of that money to meet other financial needs? Sure. Everyone has books and clothes to buy, transportation to fund, and emergencies to cover for. But you’ll also use it for going to Denny’s at 2am or buying concert tickets or obtaining, ahem, liquid refreshment for parties. How to make and manage THAT money is what we’ll be talking about.

So how do you make money while you’re in school? There are three ways. You earn it, you borrow it, or it’s given to you. Let’s start at the end.

Some people have money given to them when they go to college. Parents and other relatives bestow financial gifts, Christmas and birthday money shows up regularly, and at the high-end extreme there are students with either really rich parents, trust funds, or both. I’m going to go out on a limb here and assume that if you’re reading the Start Young Financial blog, you probably don’t fall into this extreme category. But you might have some financial gifts come your way periodically, and that’s great.

Borrowing to get your fun money can take two forms. If you take out loans for college or graduate school, sometimes you’ll have the option to borrow more than you need for tuition and lodging, so you’ll have a few hundred or thousand dollars available for miscellaneous needs. Alternately, college students are the #1 market for credit card companies to target, so opening new credit cards in school can also get you disposable funds. One of these borrowing methods is logical, sensible, and worth doing. One is not. Care to guess which is which?

Student loans can be a pain, especially if you end up not getting the level of salary after graduating that you want. For that reason, getting scholarships and grants are always preferable. But if you are going to be taking out student loans anyway, I would actually recommend taking out the maximum amount you can and using the overage to boost your standard of living, which includes having fun money. Yes, you are borrowing from your future to fund your present, but student loans have relatively low interest rates, a wide variety of payback plans, and even ways to be deferred, put in forbearance, and forgiven. If you’re going to borrow money in school, this is the way to go.

Here’s how to use credit cards when you’re in college: don’t. They are the slipperiest slope you could possibly imagine, and no matter what the card representatives say when they visit campus, the credit card companies do not care about you. They ONLY want your money. If you rack up thousands in credit card debt, you’ll be lining their pockets for years to come with little or nothing to show for it. Avoid credit cards like the plague.

(Okay, okay, so you need a good credit score. Fine. Get one and only one credit card, put one and only one recurring payment on it—a cell phone bill or gym membership is perfect for this—and then auto-pay the card off in full every month from your bank account’s online bill pay feature. Then cut up the card and never use it for anything else. That will get you a good credit score without letting the card get its claws into you. Avoid ALL OTHER cards like the plague, at least until you’re well out of school.)

Finally, you can earn your walking around money. This is what I would recommend. Aside from helping you learn Important Life Skills like responsibility and time management  (you know, the ones your parents want you to learn but that you’ll actually appreciate learning ten years from now), it’s the easiest and most versatile way to get money while you’re in school. Here are several ways to go about it:

• Work on campus. The kitchens/dining rooms/cafeterias, the dorm entry check-in stations, the post office, the gym and pool, the bookstore and library, facilities and janitorial services, security, transportation, and every single administrative office on campus all hire students. You might not make much hourly, but your job will be close to classes and easily scheduled around them.

• Work off-campus. There are between five and five thousand coffee shops, restaurants, retail shops, bars, museums, concert halls, movie theatres, and other stores around every college campus. They all hire students. On the plus side, you’ll probably make a little more than you would on campus; on the minus side, you’ll have to factor in transportation and scheduling issues.

• Work on campus 2.0. While most of the positions listed above are unskilled and indiscriminate, there are on-campus positions that require more specific people. Teaching assistants (TAs), research assistants (RAs), tutors, graders, residence/student life/dorm/hall assistants (also often called RAs), tour guides and student visit ambassadors, etc., all require people with specific backgrounds, skills, and personalities. These positions often pay better, though they may require more of a time commitment.

• Internships. These can be done concurrently with classes, instead of classes, or as a summer experiential opportunity. They are typically meant to expose students to an industry in which they may want to pursue a career, and also help those students make important connections. Fair warning, though: internships can be brutally intense, require significant time commitments and/or travel, and may not pay or cover travel/housing costs. Internships can be valuable experiences, but if your goal is to make some money, research carefully to find ones willing to pay you.

• Start a business. If you’ve got an entrepreneurial spirit or a skill people will pay you for, why not go into business for yourself? It could be something school-related like editing papers, tutoring, or giving rides to and from the airport, or it could be completely unrelated, like teaching guitar lessons or designing websites.

• Come up with something unique! These options are just the tip of the iceberg.

Okay, we’ve talked about making your fun money. Now let’s talk about how to manage it.

“But James,” I hear you cry. “If it’s fun money, can’t we do whatever we want with it?!”

Of course you can.

But that doesn’t necessarily mean that you SHOULD.

In the immortal words of Bill Nye the Science Guy, please Consider the Following:

Whatever job you have while you’re in school, you won’t be able to work a ton of hours without cutting into your classes, your social life, and your sleep. Sometimes you may have to shortchange one of those things, but I wouldn’t recommend doing that too often just to make a few more dollars. (Especially when it comes to sleep.) So while you’ll be making money, you won’t be making ALL that much, maybe a hundred dollars a week or so.

A cool C-note a week actually sounds like a lot, right? But trust me, after a few visits to Chipotle, a bar crawl or two, and some impulse buys at the grocery store, it’ll be gone—and if you’re lucky, that will happen next Wednesday instead of at the end of the weekend right after you got the $100 to begin with. Then where are you? Broke, with several days left before you get paid again. And this is exactly where our old friends the credit card companies want you to be. They want you to get used to using their cards to make up the shortfall between the end of your money and your next payday, conveniently forgetting that you’ll have to use the next payday to cover what you’re spending now.

But you’re reading Start Young Financial, so I know you’re too smart to fall into that trap.

So here’s what you do instead. First, when you get your weekly $100 paycheck, pay your immediate expenses and bills out of it right away, if you have any that aren’t already covered. Then put 25% of what’s left in a savings account that has a future goal tied to it—plane tickets for a vacation, or the new iPhone, or a monthly shopping spree or poker tournament, or even for an emergency fund; whatever you know you want badly enough to forego some immediate fun in order to do. What’s left after you’ve done those two things is your fun money. Go spend it on whatever you want! But here’s the important part: commit to spending only that amount of money that week. Once it’s gone, it’s gone, and if you blow it all the first night, you’ll have to sit through the rest of the week without any fun money.

Will this be difficult? You bet. It will be excruciating. You’ll want to spend all of it all the time. Chances are your friends will be blowing their $100 paychecks all over the place, spending left and right, and maybe even giving you a hard time about why you’re not doing it too. But think about this: if people don’t respect your financial decisions, they aren’t really your friends to begin with, and those who choose to let college be a time of rampant fiscal irresponsibility (and not making a conscious decision on this is still making a decision) are most likely to wind up drowning in credit card debt and wondering what happened. Stay strong. Know that you can still enjoy the present without compromising the future. And I promise you, by the time you’re done with college you will be light-years ahead of most of your peers financially—and have a stronger character as well. I think that’s worth a little money management, don’t you?

Want more? Feel free to come visit my website HeldForRanson.com

James Ranson is the founder and chief communications officer of Held For Ranson Professional Communications, a location-independent business and blog providing content writing, grant writing, editing, presentation coaching, professional feedback, and career services to entrepreneurs, bloggers, travelers, coaches, nonprofits, and more. After many years of feeling life was holding him for ransom, James decided that enough was enough: it was time to wake up and start holding life for Ranson, hence the company name. James has written grants for three opera companies, coached speakers for three (going on four) TEDx events, managed three professional box offices, sung in Carnegie Hall, and at one point could swim a mile in under 20 minutes.

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