The cost of living is rising faster than ever, and tuition fees don’t look like they’re going to get any cheaper. Add to this the average student’s low income and it’s no wonder that so many are worried about finance.

There are a few guides out there that claim to help students with the daunting task of sorting out their finances; some are dull, some are full of bank jargon and the rest just aren’t comprehensive enough.

We’ve noticed the woefully inadequate lack of support for students dealing with finances and so we’ve produced an e-book on student finance – with a twist.

As well as the important stuff on managing overdrafts and finding work, it’ll also help students to plan a gap year, unlock free money (legally) and maintain an active social life without breaking the bank.

The e-book is free to download from the site and is available now! Click here to get your copy.

The latest feature on the Beanzine has been launched today - a weekly article on the best money saving tips for students.

The articles will summarise the best of the Beanboard, and feature freebies and deals that all students should know about! The fact that it’s weekly, as opposed to monthly, means that we can shout about the best offers before they expire.

An extract of the article can be read below:

“It’s a myth that you can’t be a fully-fledged student unless you’re struggling for cash. This new series of weekly articles will provide you with handy money-saving tips hauled from far and wide!

New Deals
Entertainment:
Have a cosy night in and order DVDs from £2.99 at HMV. This deal includes titles like ‘The Devil Wears Prada‘ and ‘Donnie Darko‘. With such a wide selection of titles available, and free delivery, it’d be wise to stock up now for birthdays!

Fancy going out instead? Get £1.50 off Vue cinema tickets with this printable voucher, valid until 11th August.

Fashion:
ASOS’s summer sale has been revived along with the sunshine, and loads of great pieces are dropping in price. Go there for cheap-as-chips summer essentials…”

Like what you see? Then read the rest of the article here.

Happy Saving,

Beanteam

studentbeans.com & ladbrokespoker.com have teamed up to bring you

The student poker tournament of the summer!

With only studentbeans.com members playing this could be student poker’s richest poker tournament of the year!

The event is 100% exclusive to studentbeans.com members

The prize pool is now over $3000 and is set to grow this weekend

The tournament takes place this Sunday (22nd June) at 7pm, click here for more information.

Saturday afternoon saw me and James head down to the London Television Centre at Southbank.

No, StudentBeans.com wasn’t about to make its TV debut! We were there to be part of the studio audience for ITV’s latest game show ‘Who Dares, Sings’, presented by Denise Van Outen and Ben Shepherd.

To put it simply the game show was a glamourised karaoke competition, where, instead of a free round at a hotel bar in Benidorm, the prize was £50,000.

I wish I could say that ITV requested the presence of the UK’s leading student website but I’d be lying. James applied for tickets like everyone else through ApplauseStore.com after the website had been posted on the Bean Board.

There was plenty of audience participation, where we sang along to karaoke classics like Chain Reaction, Winner Takes It All and air-guitared to Bohemian Rhapsody.

We were kept entertained in-between takes by Andy, our warm-up guy who ensured that everyone he talked to was left red-cheeked by the end of the conversation (much to the audience’s comedic delight!).

Though we were let in thirty minutes late and left with sore throats (we had to clap/cheer/wave madly on cue) we had a fantastic evening. The fact that it was totally free was even better!

If you’re in the London area or don’t mind travelling, then keep your eye on the Bean Board for shows like Big Brother, Top Gear and The Lily Allen Show wanting you to be a part of their audience!

The tickets are always completely free, and there are loads of shows that want glamourous, fun and outrageously noisy studio audiences. In exchange you get B-List celeb sightings and the chance to wave madly saying ‘Hi Mum!’ on Prime-Time TV.

studentbeans.com is looking for talented web developers to join its in-house development team.

We will pay £400 to anyone who introduces us to someone who we then go on to employ.

If you know of anyone who may be interested in this position, please either pass on our details to them or send us their details if they are happy for us to get in touch with them directly. Either way, make sure you let us know you have recommended them so we can pay you your finders fee!

With over 125,000 members, we are a leading student focused website and with exciting developments on our roadmap we are poised for exceptional growth.

We are looking for individuals who are both creative and passionate about developing websites.

The role offers diversity, autonomy and potential for rapid career progression and development.

The successful person will have experience of the following skills:

* Strong object-orientated PHP/MySQL
* JavaScript (DOM/AJAX etc)
* Strong hand-built XHTML/CSS
* Understanding of user interface,
* SEO and overall user experience
* Understanding of Web and Accessibility standards
* Photoshop/Illustrator/Flash experience a bonus
* Be a recent graduate or graduating in summer 2008

Examples of work are essential.

How do I apply?

Applications should consist of a cover letter and CV. For further information or to apply, please e-mail talent @ studentbeans.com.

*Applicants must be eligible to work in the UK

After repeated requests from non-students for their own deal and discount service. We have been busy building a site to satisfy their needs and also to provide a home for studentbeans.com members once they graduate into the big wide world.

The new site is under going testing and we hope to launch it soon.

Watch this space for more information.

Saturday saw me take the day out and drive up to Warwick university for the Young Entrepreneurs Forum. A gathering of like-minded people interested in being an Entrepreneur or finding out more information and what it’s all about. I was there to deliver a talk ‘Behind The Beans’ giving an insight to how we got started and what it takes to be an entrepreneur.

It is great going to meet aspiring students full of drive, enthusiasm and self-belief about their ideas. Whilst there are those that have their idea already, others are still searching for that light-bulb moment. What I think they all have in common is they all have the opportunity to make a go of it.

Not every idea is going to work but a common phrase that is mentioned is that if not your failing you’re not trying hard enough. It’s true as well you learn far more from your mistakes than you do from getting things right all the time. It’s not just about new ideas or reinventing the wheel but it’s about doing something slightly different, or better than anyone else – with the fantastic customer service in the UK I am sure everyone reading this can think of an experience they’ve had with a company in the last week that could be improved upon by another business.

Another speaker that seems to be getting it right a lot of the time was Edinburgh schoolboy Fraser Doherty of SuperJam. He went into the jam‐making trade at the age of 14, after his homemade preserves sold well locally.

Now at nineteen, Fraser has won a number of prestigious awards and been the focus of a great deal of media coverage. The product is a range of no added sugar ‘super fruit’ spreads. These are made from the most nutritious fruits around such as blueberries and cranberries and are sweetened with grape juice rather than sugar or sweeteners. Amazingly Fraser went into an industry that existed for hundreds of years and has been able to do extremely well selling over 500,000 jars in the last year. It was great to hear his story first hand along with the creation of the SuperJam foundation which is about to launch it’s first tea parties for the elderly all supported by Waitrose his first big national distributor.

Overall it was a great event, not only to share our experiences and help to inspire others but to meet students and other speakers a like - not to mention studentbeans.com fans that share their favourite offers with us.

Feel free to contact us if there is any event you want us to speak at.

The last few days I’ve been away in Dubai attending this years Kids and Youth Marketing Summit. Following an invitation to run a workshop on digital and online strategies it was a fantastic opportunity to represent studentbeans.com - experience a different culture and share our expertise in the market place.

Dubai is an amazing place full of opportunity with a huge amount of growth and development occurring everywhere you look. The weather predictably was blue skies however as it was a conference, the most part of the 4 of the 5 days I was there was spent inside a hotel which could have been like any other 5 star hotel in any other part of the world.

My Workshop: With an audience from countries including Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Dubai, Kuwait and others it was a challenge to ensure the information was pitched at the right level and I was able to engage with delegates.

The topics covered included:

- Optimising your media mix with the most applicable new technologies to maximise revenue for your brand and target market.
- Identifying which key channels you need to be using and how you can transmit your message.
- Developing long-term brand values by ensuring your messages are seen and used in youth-friendly media.

The workshop ran for the whole day providing participation and interaction throughout – The session I ran was received extremely well and I got some fantastic feedback so I was really pleased with the outcome of the day and overall experience.

Other speakers at the conference included Ahmed Nassef from Maktoob the largest social networking website in the region, Michael Brown – the exclusive agent for Crocs in the region, LG Electronics, HP amongst others. A representative from Ski Dubai, a local attraction was also speaking, an amazing attraction that has real snow in the middle of the desert! I managed to experience it one evening a very surreal experience and a lot of fun!

One of the highlights was hearing Abdullatif Al Sayega speak the CEO of Arab Media Group. An amazing person on of the regions most influential business leaders he has been involved in launched MTV Arabia television channel as well as a partnership with Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Radio International radio station, Virgin Radio Dubai.

He spoke about the excitement and opportunity that needs to be embraced. Whilst he also commented that the developments in the region are not that people locally are becoming westernised, but that they are becoming modernised. It is leaders like him that are doing such brilliant things and looking to the future to embrace development and not shy away from the way the world is developing.

Overall it was a fantastic few days and interesting to see and experience a country with so much development and opportunity. If you’ve not been I’d definitely recommend a trip whether it be for business or pleasure, for desert safari, skiing, the 7 star hotels, beaches, shopping malls bigger than you can imagine – it really has everything and more you could ever imagine.

Beanzine, the online student magazine from studentbeans.com has just launched.

Content channels based around entertainment, fashion, lifestyle, travel, and jobs are contributed by a national team of talented student writers.

As well as our news, features, opinion and editorial content, Beanzine is the essential guide to student life, a crucial reference guide to everything from music festivals to writing a winning CV.

Interested in working for Beanzine?
Do you want to gain great experience and have your articles published on the UK’s leading student website?

Through exposure on Beanzine, our aim is to help launch careers of aspiring journalists and writers in the media.

If you want to benefit from this great opportunity and be part of the Beanzine team – please send an email to beanzine [at] studentbeans.com, with your CV, and a 400 word article with a title of your choice.

Yesterday saw me take a road trip up to Oxford to hear Richard Reed, one of the founders of Innocent Drinks speak at Oxford Entrepreneurs. As a true fan of Innocent I wasn’t disappointed. For those of you reading this who have had a smoothie or two but not ‘joined the family’ Innocent have an amazing way of doing things differently. Whilst other smoothie companies have come and gone in the last 8 years Innocent has gone from strength to strength not sacrificing on quality building an amazing business.

The Story began with 3 men with an idea; to make it easy for people to do themselves some good. In the summer of 1998, they bought £500 worth of fruit, turned it into smoothies and sold them from a stall at a little music festival in London. They put up a sign saying, ‘Do you think we should give up our jobs to make these smoothies?’ They had two bins, one saying YES and the other NO and asked people top put their empty bottle is the right bin. The next day they had all resigned from their jobs.

What I like about Innocent is that they don’t take themselves too seriously and as a brand they are constantly re-enforcing their message over and over again from quirky jokes on their packaging to their recent invitation for people to apply to join them at their AGM!

They make me smile, and feel good A couple of things I took from the night were Richard’s thoughts on Entrepreneurship with thinking big, but starting small! Having been running studentbeans.com since 2005 we started in Birmingham small and now all across the UK. I think so many people have ideas but never start because they don’t have this in mind and think what they want to do is just impossible.

One final thing was the reference to Richard and other senior team members being Chief Squeezers who are involved in the final stage interview process of applicants to work a fruit towers. I guess that makes me a Chief Bean! Not sure if it’s got the same ring to it?!