As a part of my cleaning yesterday I ended up throwing out lots of bank statements and the like.

Before I did this though I recorded the closing balance of my accounts at the end of each month for the past five years.

It is interesting to look at how your cash flow is affected as you going through various stages of being a student.

This first graph is of cash available (i.e. max overdraft and max visa card) compared to that of cash used.

During First Year (05) I was living at home and it really wasn’t until the end of the year that my cash flow started to slip.

During Second Year you can see a huge collapse at the start of the year when I moved out of home. The next two years show the attempted recovery from this.

During Third Year you can see the ups and downs of the bank balance as various stages were gone through. The first peak is just before the start of semester and then the drop shows what happens when you have to buy all your text books. The second spike is when my tax return came in, before collapsing again at the start of Semester two, finally you will see a large drop at the end of the year when my car needed urgent repairs costing almost a grand.

During the four period (first year of no uni), you will see the battle to keep the bank balance stable, with a spike mid year when the tax return comes in, but then a decline as bills are paid. This also shows that student president doesn’t pay that well.

This second graph shows the maximum amount of credit I could borrow at any one time and my actual borrowings.

Again it is interesting to note the stages as events happen.

The first decline is in first year when I brought my first car, a digital camera and mp3 player.

In second year the decline continues mainly due to worsening cash flow from moving out of home.

The major drop at the start of third year is when I brought my new car, however from this point forward you can see the improvements as I decide I have had enough of being in deep debt, and you can see this following through into 2008.

Of note on this graph as well is the way that the credit limit keeps expanding. Banks and other agencies are always trying to get you to borrow more so that they can make money off fees and interest rates.

And this leads into the third graph.

This shows borrowings as a percentage of the maximum I could borrow at the time.

It follows a very rough bell curve shape with everything turning to custard in second year and improving since then.

So in all this doesn’t say that much. Other than being a student does cost, it costs a lot, I have deliberately left the actual dollar amounts off these graphs, and haven’t included my student loan balance either. Also when things come out of the blue like car repairs they can have major impacts on your bank balance if you are not prepared for them.