(NNPA)—Freshman students are financial novices with newfound freedom on a college campus where the rubber meets the road.

The campus learning challenges and managing living cost can become overwhelming. My advice is geared towards helping students flying out of the nest to spend wisely with tips and valuable lessons on money management 101.

Don’t flunk the everyday course of money management skills. Every student needs to budget. By planning to spend wisely, you avoid the pitfalls and learn the ways of paying for goods and services.

Disciplining your spending habits keeps you in control and guarantees you will not be short of cash to enjoy campus life, earn your degree with honors and not dread filing for bankruptcy the day after graduation.

Invest in yourself

When you invest in yourself and honor those things that you know and love, you can reap big rewards that can enrich your future.

If you don’t go within, you go without. You deserve to get to where you want to be, period. Consider this. If your personal bank account is worth billions, imagine what you would be able to materialize in your outer world. But if your personal inventory is low—and you are not doing the things you love, guess what. You probably won’t be personally or professionally successful by any stretch of that world. Like the old saying goes, life is not a dress rehearsal. Remember, discipline weighs ounces but regrets weigh tons. In life, if you do not have discipline, you have nothing.

Develop your financial personality to keep your spending under control. We all relate to money differently and usually in an emotional way. There’s a set amount of money coming in, and that’s what you’ve got to spend. Yet, for most adults the mantra is “don’t spend more than you earn,” for students it’s “don’t spend more than you’ve got.”

Cash is king on campus. Discipline will help you avoid getting carried away because much of the cash is borrowed or coming in from your parents anyway. Time is perhaps the most critical ingredient here; the more you have of it, the less money you need to reach your goal.

At 10 percent, a 20 year old only needs to sock away $135 per month or $4.50 per day to become a millionaire by 65.

Invest in what you know

I know that for many, this may still seem like a scary wall to climb, but I encourage you to get comfortable with investigating stocks that relate to your passion and interests (remember, if you drink Coke every day and love to download music on iTunes, maybe Coke in the form of “KO” and Apple in the form of “AAPL” would be great stock picks for you to research and follow).

KO is the ticker symbol for Coke; AAPL is the symbol for Apple, which is traded on the NASDAQ. If you did buy into those funky Croc shoes and they line your closet, you weren’t the only one helping its stock skyrocket.

It has experienced a meteoric rise in price nearly unprecedented in modern footwear stocks. Also remember that you are not investing on Wall Street per se even when you buy a stock. You are investing in what you know and love.

Join or start a campus investment club

Here’s an idea, too, that can also extend your network in general. Start an investment club with like-minded campus student members and pool your money to invest as a group in the market.

This adds to the fun factor and forces an exchange of ideas and thoughts on potential companies that can enhance your trading skills and knowledge. The National Association of Investor Corp. (www.betterinvesting.org) has all the information you need to get your investment club in gear.

(Farrah Gray is author of “Get Real, Get Rich: Conquer the 7 Lies Blocking You from Success” and the international best-seller “Reallionaire: Nine Steps to Becoming Rich from the Inside Out.” He is chairman of the Farrah Gray Foundation. He can be reached via e-mail at fg@drfarrahgray.com or on his website at www.drfarrahgray.com.)