Managing your money as a student can be a challenge- you’ve never managed lump sums of money before, paid bills or even learnt about personal finance at school. But right now is the absolute best time to form good money habits, before you enter the world of full time employment.

There are a ton of ways to manage your money, but we already spend so much time on our smartphones- so why not use them to our advantage and use them to help save money?

• Monzo

Monzo is probably one of the best apps for budgeting and managing your money. There are a number of features that allow you to set spending limits on various categories. For example, if you had £300 to spend within a given month- you can decided to split this money up into groceries, travel, entertainment, food and drink- and then set your ideal spending limit for each category.

Monzo will keep track of this for you and automatically allocate your spending to each category. A notification will pop up on your phone every time you make a transaction, and even alert you to let you know when you have spent your budget for a particular category for the month. It will also let you know if it anticipates that you are going to go over budget for the month.

You can also create ‘saving pots’ where you can stash money away for a special occasion or event. Perfect for saving up for that summer trip!

• Plum

Plum is a brilliant auto-saving solution, it uses AI technology to help save you money! It’s a ‘chat bot’ rather than an app which will analyse your spending to decide how much money you can afford to save each month.

You don’t even need to think about saving yourself as Plum does the leg work for you!

Plum communicates through Facebook Messenger and will notify you of how much money has been saved each week. You can also send requests through the Messenger app to ask Plum to ‘withdraw £30’ or ‘save more.’

Another fun highlight of Plum is that you send Plum emoji’s to show how much more you would like to save based on your ‘mood.’ For example, if you send the emoji to show you are feeling ‘ambitious’ Plum will save 50% more.

Check out this guide on how to save money at university to get even MORE ideas about how to manage your money well.

• Curve

Curve is a app-based card, and the brilliant feature of the card is that it allows you to switch between your different cards when you pay with the Curve card.

For example, if you bought something with your Curve card, and within the app, you had set it to pay with your debit card, but then later that day wanted to switch to a credit card- you could switch it.

The Curve app allows you to switch the cards you used for the purchase up to 14 days after the transaction- as long as you used your Curve card for the transaction.

• Google Sheets

Some people prefer to track their spending on an Excel document- but it’s not always easy to remember to update an Excel document if it lives on your laptop. A great alternative to this is to swap to Google Sheets.

Google Sheets is completely free to use, and you can download an app so that you can keep track of your budget from your smartphone.

Create a great budgeting spreadsheet, and keep it updated in order to save money whilst at university.

• Revolut

Although the Revolut card is not necessarily helpful for day-to-day student spending. But it will save you money on foreign currency when you go abroad with your friends- who doesn’t love a fun summer break with your flatmates?!

Just like Monzo, Revolut will alert you every time you make a purchase- meaning that you can keep tabs on your holiday spending at all times.

Revolut say that they save their average holidaymaker £46 on every trip as they don’t have to pay any commission on foreign currency exchange. It’s a no brainer to save money when you’re abroad!

Even if you download one of these apps, you can be sure that it will help you to save some money while you are at university. It’s easy to keep track of your money when your spending is staring at you from your smartphone screen!