To apply for funding/bursary I don't strictly need?

[fundingethics]

I'm having a bit of an ethical dilemma. I'm a mature university student and in receipt of the full maintenance loan, my only income at the moment is my student finance.

I'm around 6 weeks into my first year. At the start of the course, I bought myself a laptop. It was a big expense but was needed as my course relies a lot on having a laptop in lectures/seminars. It's pretty impossible to participate in lectures and seminars without one as we have lots of online activities to do during them which you can't really do on a phone.

I've since found out that applications have just opened to receive a small one-off payment to put towards purchasing IT equipment. It would cover half the cost of my laptop, for context. I didn't know this was a thing until today, but having applications open 6 weeks into term seems a bit late as I've needed my laptop since my first week and couldn't have held out for this long without one.

Do you think it would be ok to apply for the bursary and kind of apply it retrospectively to my purchase? Or is it unethical as I now own a laptop and so am not currently in need of one?

It depends if you can fairly easily afford the laptop.

It depends on what the application forms say. If it is allowed, go for it!

If it’s allowed do it, the money you spent is meant to last a while so I’d be surprised if you can’t.

Just bumping this to see if there are any other opinions. There is nothing about whether it can be applied retrospectively, it just says you need to say what you would spend the money on (so I guess I'd have to lie and say a laptop?)

I couldn't really afford the laptop at the time, it used a significant portion of my student finance maintenance loan for the Autumn term which meant money is going to be tight until my next payment (January).