JoshThe idea of being financially free sounds out reach for most students. This is due to the fact that most students are used to being funded by their parents during their college years. Others depend on the student loans to pay their tuition fees and use the remaining amounts for their living costs as they study. With no regular source of income on a monthly basis; students therefore find themselves in a vicious cycle of receiving student loans at the beginning of the semester and waiting until the next semester in order to get more income.
Being a young energetic and fun loving student, you however need to have some surplus cash at any given time to spoil yourself, travel and have fun during your college days. To get to a level whereby you can afford a little bit of luxury beyond the mere survival in college, you will need to find a path to navigate through until you achieve financial freedom as a student. There are several alternatives available that you choose to pursue and earn some extra income that will help you afford a higher quality of life in college; and below we have discussed the top 4.
- Blogging
Most students spend their time online on social media sites and blogs finding the latest news, gossip or learning a hobby. You can capitalize on the fact that you have lots of free time when in college to write and start your own blog where you can be sharing insights and news on different topics of interest. With high traffic coming to your blog, you can them commercialize the blog through getting advertisements from companies and google ads. Based on how high traffic to your blog is, you can always have many advertisers approaching you to advertise on your site; and this can actually turn out to be source income enough to even start repaying your student loan, in addition to helping you start saving to invest for your future.
- Online trading
Online trading is the second most easiest and unconventional way to make money online at your own free time; without having to worry about your part-time income generating occupation interfering with your class timetable. All you need is to open an online trading account with a trusted broker and learn the basics on trading from the tutorials provided. You will then start trading first by using a demo account and then move to a live account. The good news is that through social trading, you are able to learn how to trade effectively from other veteran traders on your chosen platform; and you can actually mirror their trading decisions in order to maximize your chances of returning high profits like they do. This accelerates your learning curve while at the same time helping you avoid making grave trading decisions that can wipe out all your invested capital.
- Working as a research fellow
In most institutions of higher learning, there are always professors who are involved in research both for their institution of higher learning or for other public and private institutions. Many a times the lead researchers will need to constitute a research team that will have junior researchers who are paid to help in data collection and analysis. You can tap into this as a source of income as well as a way of learning more within your chosen career path. By working under the lead researcher who in most cases will be a lecturer within your institution of learning, you will be creating a good reputation within the school administration while earning a living from it. Most of the external research projects outsourced to your institutions by public and private institutions will be high paying engagements that can last from between 6 months to one year; hence providing you with significant extra income for more than one academic year.
- Invest using a robo-advisor
Robo-advisors are automated investment systems that use complex algorithms to determine the optimum investment strategy and investment asset classes for you. The financial advice from the robo-advisor is generated from your personal risk appetite, amount of capital available for investment and your preferred investment period among many other factors. You can choose to set aside part of your pocket money into investments that provide regular incomes. You can then use a robo-advisor in allocating your capital among different investment asset classes; in order to maximize your returns and minimize your risk exposure in the turbulent global financial markets.
Depending on how much money you have at your disposal, you can decide to invest it in any of the above sources of extra income; or you can choose to mix any of them. However, as a rule of thumb in investing, diversification is highly recommended since it results to the dual benefit of lower risk and higher returns.