(Credit – Austin Distel at Unsplash)
Hi KCL! Students have many expenses to think about ,and this can be even more daunting if you’re based in London. This is where Blackbullion comes in. Blackbullion.com is an online platform that provides students with financial confidence and knowledge, ultimately leading to better decision making skills. Luckily for us, with our KCL email address, we can register an account with Blackbullion for free! There’s lots of features you have access to, including articles, videos and other tools. I’m going to share my thoughts on some tools which I found particularly useful and how you can make the most of them.
The first tool which helped me a lot was the spending snapshot. This tool is really easy to use, it involves you taking a couple of minutes to enter information about your income and expenses, and you can see how much money you’d be left with at the end of the academic year. Whenever I’ve tried to calculate my budget, I’ve always forgotten to include a particular expense however this tool takes pretty much any type of expense and source of income into account. You can input any income from student loans, bursaries, part-time work and more. In terms of expenses, you can input rent, bills, food shopping, going out (events, clubs etc), insurance and subscriptions – it’s very thorough!. My tip would be to use this tool before you begin the next academic year so that you can see whether your loans and/or part-time jobs cover your planned expenses. If not, you can try thinking of ways to cut down on some of your expenses (perhaps by taking a look at Blackbullion’s budgeting module). They also have a great budgeting calculator. This is very similar to the spending snapshot tool but includes more subcategories of expenses so may take slightly longer to use.
Another tool which I found really useful was the student loan repayment estimator. This tool provides you with a list of careers to choose from e.g. doctor, teacher, lawyer etc. Once you have selected your most likely career, the calculator will estimate your annual salary (based on the national average), your monthly student loan repayment and your resulting monthly take home pay. You can see how your salary will progress up to 30 years and the corresponding increase in monthly student loan repayments. If your ideal career does not appear on the list, or if you are not sure which career you’d like to follow, you can select the custom feature! This allows you enter any starting salary and you can see how much your student loan repayment would be each month. Although this is an estimate, it can give you a rough idea of how much of your salary goes towards student loan repayments when you graduate and the number isn’t usually as high as people think!
I hope this has helped you learn more about Blackbullion and how you can use this platform to further develop your financial skills!
Aanchal Raina
King’s Student Money Mentor
Part of Money & Housing Advice
The King’s Student Money Mentors blog shares our students’ personal experiences and thoughts on money-related topics. Any reference, opinions or recommendations on a particular company/brand are only the views of the student(s) who wrote the blog post. King’s College London, the Money & Housing Advice service and the Money Mentor project do not share the views in the blogs nor endorse any of the companies mentioned. Readers should conduct their own research before using any companies mentioned in our blog posts.