It’s that time of year, again; students across the country will be waiting nervously for their course results, hoping that they won’t have to face the dreaded resits during their summer break. If all goes to plan, and they return to uni after the summer, they’ll be heading to their shared digs and will be continuing to learn a thing or two about living with housemates instead of good old mum and dad.
While sharing a house with a few of your best uni mates sounds like fun, it’s usually not problem-free, especially when financial issues crop up. In a shared house it’s everybody’s responsibility to share the bills, and if one housemate doesn’t keep up their side of the budget bargain it can affect everybody. Needless to say, student houses are definitely based on an element of trust!
One way to ensure that everyone has their fair share of responsibility is to give each housemate a bill to look after – water, heating, electricity etc. Setting up direct debits to ensure everyone pays their way can also help.
A great way in which to reduce any risk of missing payments is to limit the number of bills that a shared house has to deal with, and one easy way of doing this is to sign up for a media bundle. Rather than having accounts with multiple providers, you can sign up for packages that include television, broadband and phone services – what student wouldn’t love to have all of these, after all?
As a student, one of the main advantages of a media bundle is knowing that you only have to deal with one supplier. One bill each month is far easier to manage than several, meaning that you and the other housemates can stay ahead of the game. But that’s not the only reason why bundles are the ideal student solution.
Plenty of shared student houses can have loads of students living in them – five, six, seven or more – and as you can imagine, when this is the case, the need for a decent media package is essential. If everyone is trying to use the Internet at the same time to do their uni work, surf the net, download or game, it’s inevitable that the connection will become strained. However, with super-fast fibre-optic broadband that is up to 16x faster than regular broadband, issues are minimised.
Phoning home is another aspect that students will probably like to consider. University is a fun and hectic place, but that doesn’t mean a phone call home every week wouldn’t go amiss – if only to keep mum on side and sending those food packages! All students get a little homesick sometimes, and plenty of these big bundles are available that can include unlimited weekend calls to UK landlines.
Combine these two elements with 230+ TV channels, or 260+ if you include sports and movies, and you have three great reasons for investing in a bundle. Plus, if all the housemates split the bills equally, it won’t cost much either – great news if you’re planning on living on beans on toast all term.
Photograph by Sean MacEntee