Life&Style Got style? Contact us at lifeandstyle@theotherpress.ca & Student banking, uncomplicated Money tips and pointers for the post- secondary masses By Jenn Markham, Contributor tudents aren’t the most prudent of individuals when it comes to money, probably because we have so little of it. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be aware of what you can do with the money you have. Here is some simple advice for the standard student to help keep finances in check. Banking fees Some financial institutions offer free banking for students, or until you turn 19 or 25. To reap these benefits, often all you need is proof of enrolment. But, be warned: even if you’re going to school for multiple consecutive years, you may have to go in yearly to update it. Tuition payments Students might have been surprised when paying tuition this fall that Douglas College no longer accepts credit cards. Alternatively, students can pay tuition with cash, cheque, or debit online or in person. Some financial institutions also accept online payments. If you’re not comfortable carrying large sums of cash around, a money order (for under $5,000) or a bank draft (for over $5,000) is a good option. The money is debited from your account right away, and you’re given a cheque-like slip to use in place, in some cases for a small fee. Interest rates For students who previously used credit cards to pay their tuition, and had the money saved up, finding an alternative route to pay will be easier than for the students who carried a balance on theirs or someone else’s credit card from tuition. It gets tricky when you start to think about how much extra you're paying ona credit card with 19 to 20 per cent interest. That’s where a personal line of credit might work better. Like a credit card, you can borrow money and make payments, but interest rates are lower, sometimes between three and five per cent. The likelihood to get accepted for these is often based on your credit score. Credit rating A credit rating is basically someone else keeping track of how often you make payments, and the likelihood that you'll default on payments in the future. The idea is that no one will lend you money if they don’t have reason to believe you will be able to pay it back. When you turn 19, you have no credit rating, and in the scheme of lending, that’s equivalent to having a bad credit rating. This becomes important later when you want to get a mortgage for a house, or other lending products. Getting a credit card with a low limit that you pay off every month will help build good credit, as well as paying other bills on time such as your cellphone and house utilities. An introduction to social media detox Social Media Detox One students courageous attempt to escape the damaging clutches of a Facebook-addicted world By Sophie Isbister, Contributor on’t you hate that feeling? You know the one. The hot warmth on the palm of your hands as you cradle the back of your smartphone like it’s the skull of your precious newborn baby, gazing into its single LCD eye. That’s the feeling I’m thinking about as I plan my current personal experiment: a four- week social media detox, chronicled in The Other Press, the trusty traditional media source that you’re currently reading. I started to suspect I might have a dependency on social media when I picked up my Android 10 I smartphone to check my Facebook notifications— while I was already looking at Facebook in my laptop browser window. My suspicions were further confirmed when I realized I couldn’t pick a sushi restaurant in downtown Vancouver without the aid of the review and maps site Yelp, available in a handy app on my phone. Katrina C. says that Sushi Bang is the best sushi place downtown, but Kelvin G. wonders how anyone could possibly consider Sushi Bang to even be food, which leaves Sophie I. wondering where the hell she should get her negitoro roll with all this conflicting information! But stuff really started to get real when I found myself delving deep into a maze of comments- upon-comments in the blogosphere. I would click, scroll, and expand comments with an almost compulsive zeal. I would not be content until I had read all 1,476 comments on every Huffington Post article, no matter how much the uninformed opinions of the masses pained me. Negative comments made me wince, while comments I agreed with bolstered my spirits just enough to keep the endless loop going. Now it seems I can’t read a book without seeing what Jessica K. on Goodreads thinks about it. I can’t pick a perfume or nail polish without seeing what the folks at Basenotes or Makeupalley think. And I definitely can’t make a life- altering decision without first posing the question to my over-600 Facebook friends (595 of whom I never see on a regular basis). It has become abundantly clear that this needs to stop. On Sunday, September 16, I will be cutting the cord, shutting the door, and dimming the lights on my decade- long relationship with social media. No longer will I Tweet or Yelp or Flickr my way through the World Wide Web. For the duration of my four-week experiment I will remove all the social media apps from my phone. I'll steer clear of web-based media and their downward spiral of vicious commenters. I’ll even try to plan my birthday party the old fashioned way: by dusting off the “call” function on my smart phone and actually saying, “Hey,” no matter how tedious and time consuming it promises to be. Stay tuned.