FINishing Strong: Getting Through Hell Week
Whether it be midterms, finals, a ton of requirements, or the dreaded backlogs, hell week has been and always will be part of student life. Heck, there’s probably even a good chance that you’re going through hell week right now (which in this case, you’re in the right place!). If you’re thinking though that the key to hell week is the #Kakayanin attitude, then you’re partially right. However, there’s a more systematic and well-rounded approach to FINishing hell week strong. With some personal finance principles, you can actually get through hell week alive and even stronger!
Goal-Setting
Setting your goals is the first step in personal finance. Do you want to become a millionaire? Do you want to have enough money to check out my cart during 11.11 or 12.12? By setting your goals, you are able to have a clear vision of what we want to achieve. Just like in academics, the first step you need to take is setting your goals straight. Is there a specific grade I need to get? Are there any grade retention requirements I need to keep in mind? Knowing what you’re working towards helps you better understand what you need to do to get there.
When setting your goals, it’s also a great idea to make it S.M.A.R.T. (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, Timely). This will help in making sure that what you want to achieve for hell week is actually feasible, and something you can reach.
Investments
A large part of finance is investing: putting your money in a fund for it to generate returns (a.k.a more money!). When it’s hell week, think of yourself as an investment: by investing in you, you have a much better chance of achieving your goals. Academically, there are two common investing options. First, you can invest by widening your knowledge so that you better know how to answer those hard math problems or long essays. Or, it can simply be investing in your well-being by taking care of yourself so that you can be well-rested, which can help improve productivity.
There are tons of more investing options for you, but these are the two most common ones. We personally recommend that you try to test out both even before hell week so that you know what works best for you when you’ll need it.
Financial Plan
Now that you know your goals and investing options, crafting a financial plan is the in-depth planning of which investment options you will choose in order for you to achieve your goals. To relate it to hell week, you can make a schedule of which assessments, with short self-care breaks, to prioritize in order for you to finish everything on time. Making a schedule can lessen the anxiety of hell week can give since it makes the workload less overwhelming and your strategy more systematic. Maybe you can start with the harder assessments since it would require more time to finish, or the easier ones first so you can get them out of the way? You could also determine whether it’s better to prioritize your certain subjects over others.
At the end of the day, it’s up to you to plan your investments wisely so that you can reach your goals for hell week.
Budgeting
Budgeting is one of the most important things you do when crafting your financial plan. The most common budgeting tip is the 50–30–20 rule. This means that you need to allot 50% of your income to your needs, 30% to your wants and 20% to your savings. What if I tell you that you can also apply this when doing acads? The proportion of the day doesn’t have to be the same as the 50–30–20 rule. But, by budgeting your time wisely, you’ll be able to finish hell week and all your tasks, and also get some rest in between. You can also use certain strategies or techniques such as the Pomodoro, Time Blocking, and Personal Kanban techniques.
There are a lot of techniques in helping you stay productive and budgeting your time and effort, just like your investments, it’s best to see what’s the most effective for you in making your goals a reality.
Risk Management
Have you ever experienced doing something you love first, such as playing video games or binge watching a show, before doing your acads? Well, if you have, you’re the risky type. Risk, in financial terms means the chance that an outcome or investment’s actual gains will differ from the expected outcome or return. Think of it as like expecting to get P1000 from your investment, but there’s a risk of getting less or more than P1000.
In the theoretical situation above, the fact that you prioritize your entertainment over your acads means you are taking a risk. The more time you allot for your leisure time, the bigger the risk that you won’t be able to finish your work on time. In terms of hell week, you might want to ask yourself if you should take more risks or play it safe. Should I do my acads now and have more time if ever my profs add more workload throughout the week? Or take the risk of doing acads at the last minute since I want to binge the latest season of “You” or a K-Drama? Do I take the risk and put off my major requirements instead of my minor ones? Or, do I avoid the risk and just finish all my acads right now?
The point is, in order to manage risk, you should be aware of the factors that might affect your studies: mainly the time and additional workload. You can always watch that series some other day but if you fail to pass your requirements during hell week… Well, there’s a good chance that achieving your goals might turn out to be a little harder.
Emergency Fund
Even if you have planned every little detail to finish hell week strong, there will and will always be something that doesn’t end up according to plan. A good personal finance practice is keeping an emergency fund from the very start to help keep you afloat for a bit in case money runs low or an accident happens.
In the same way, setting aside some time as your hell week “emergency fund” is helpful just in case the unexpected happens. For example, there might be a surprise additional task that you need to do in a short amount of time. Maybe the task that you thought was easy turns out to be the most difficult one. Or, there might be some personal problems that you need to attend to immediately. No matter what it is, having an emergency time fund will help you get through your acads even in a potential worst case scenario.
Besides time, you can also prepare your own hell week emergency grade fund! For example, if you know that there’s a chance you might get low on a really hard exam or test, try your best to get really good grades on your other quizzes, homeworks, and requirements. If you can even try to compute the lowest possible score you can get in that test, given your current standing, the better. This will help in ensuring that you reach your academic goals, even if you fail a test or two.
Financial Independence
The main objective of personal finance and all these principles is financial independence. Simply put, financial independence is when you have enough money for both your needs and wants, well into the long-term.
In the same way, think of you being able to handle hell week to the point where you don’t need to worry so much. That’s how you become “financially independent” for hell week and academics! That’s the key to finishing not just your current or upcoming hell week, but for all the hell weeks to come.
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Hell week will always seem like torture for us students. But, knowing a thing or two about personal finance can help you be smart with your money AND hell week. That’s why you’ll be able to not just #kayod through hell week, but also FINish it strong!
