Are you excited about starting your first year of uni later this month? We bet you are, and then some. Right from freshers’ week onwards it’s going to be a carnival of new friends and new experiences; and you’ll even be spending a fair chunk of your time studying a subject that you love. Yep, in terms of social and academic life there’ll be nothing to worry about. But what you may find, however, is that there will be one area of life that could catch you out: your student finances.

Student finances prove to be tricky in part, of course, because you have relatively little money to play with. However, what really gets people into a right old mess with their student finances is their poor budgeting and money management. As you hopefully won’t learn because it’s a situation you won’t get yourself into, there are few things more depressing than seeing that you’re well into your overdraft with several weeks to go until your next student loan payment comes in.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. A light-touch approach to keeping tabs on your money is all that you need. Here are some key tips from reformed student-loan overspenders on how they got their student finances under control.

1) Work out a weekly amount of money available

We imagine that you’ve read this tip and groaned. “What, you expect me to budget for every item of food and every pint I have each week?” you are asking incredulously. Well, no, actually. Because we’re realists, and we know that student life is all about spontaneity.

What we’re suggesting instead is working out how much money you will have available each week if you divide up your total student loan amount between the number of weeks it has to last, and then make sure that the amount you spend stays within that limit each week. This way you can stay flexible in terms of how you spend your money, while at the same time keeping a lid on overall expenditure.

If you’re really sensible, what you can do is work out how 90% of your student loan payment spreads out over the weeks, and then keep 10% of it in reserve as contingency in case you do find that one week you overshoot on your student finances.

2) Keep your student loan payments in a separate bank account to the one your debit card is connected to

Tip #2 is designed to make sure that you can execute tip #1 properly. If you have immediate access to your entire student loan it’s a lot more difficult to make sure you are sticking to your weekly budget. But with internet banking it’s much easier to make sure that you don’t fall into this trap. All you need to do is keep the student loan in the instant savings account that is connected to your current account (a feature that most bank accounts have nowadays) and then transfer your weekly lump of cash into your current account at the start of each week.

3) Pay in cash when possible

This tip will also help you to make sure you track your purchases. If you pay for everything on card–especially the little things–it’s a lot easier to lose all sense of how much you’ve spent in the week. But by going to the cash machine, the cycle of going to the cash machine, spending it and then going back again when you run out of cash will give you a much clearer idea of how much you’re spending.