College Savings Tips

**The Black Wolf** · 04-04-2012

I just wanted to share a tip since I know there are college students on this forum.

A close person to me is going to summer school, and each semester in the summer is about a month long. Her books for both classes are a total of $500-$600, for books she will only use for a month or two.

Here's the tip:
Consider "renting" textbooks.

Because she will be renting her textbooks, she not only slashes the total in half, but her total will only be $125-$200!

A good site for renting textbooks is www.half.com and you can rent textbooks off the site using your ebay account.

One last tip from me is another one on buying or selling textbooks.

Tip:
Ask instructors for textbooks from other students or ask instructors to sell your textbook

Sometimes students will have trouble selling their textbooks after they finish the class and they will let the instructor sell it for them, at a lower price than bookstores. Vice versa, if you have trouble selling a textbook, ask an instructor to sell it for you. I can testify to this, I took a computer class and could not sell my book back. So instead of throwing the book away, I let the instructor sell it to a new student and gained some money back!

Feel free to add more tips or talk about tips and how to save in college.

**DreDayDetox** · 04-04-2012

Pretty much agree with this, but torrent those books first, find them online, pirate the shit out of them because of the simple reason of only using them for two months, and worse, a few chapters or pages and that's it..if you can't find it online for free, then do all these other steps...these publishers and authors do not deserve my money if I'm using two pages out of it.

**vegan_mekey** · 04-05-2012

Another tip. Go to a local community college for two years then transfer out.

**btbam** · 04-05-2012

i get my books from amazon and resell them to the schools bookstore. i've made a profit every year. If you search hard enough, you can find most books for cheap. Considering the school bookstore has like a 100% mark up, you can get alright money for them. Chegg also has some cheap books too. Biggest profit i made was on a science text book. it was for core classes that everyone has to take, so i chose astronomy. Got the book for 14 bucks on amazon. Sold it for 45 at the end of the semester. book store price was like 125.

**Xelios** · 04-05-2012

I've been in college for 2 years now, and I've yet to buy a book. Buying a book isnt completely necessary for classes. A lot of professors will tell you to buy the book and use it for maybe 2 days, that's it. You can look on with some other sucker.

**The Black Wolf** · 04-09-2012

Don't get a meal plan.

**Funeralfog** · 04-10-2012

dont spend money?

**admartian** · 04-10-2012

Wait, you guys can't borrow the books from the Uni library or via online resources? Granted they're limited and in high demand, you'll usually be able to get the required chapters via online reading.

Either way, try not to buy books brand new if you can help it.

Also, don't visit forums/gaming websites - they only make you want to buy games.

**The Black Wolf** · 04-10-2012

Originally Posted by Funeralfog

dont spend money?

That's impossible to do in college.

**[DT]** · 04-10-2012

Work enough to have positive cash flow?

**squirrelbo1** · 04-10-2012

I know in the states its different becuase there is some fucking ridiculous rip off with student books, but surely you have a library where everything you need is. I go to a reasonably small uni (only 12k people or so) and we have well over a million books in our library, surely you guys must be able to get hold of your books at a library ?.

We had an american girl staying with us in my halls last year, and she was shocked that she got every book she needed for her course for under £150 (it was a science and she had multiple modules) tbh I thought that was pretty expensive. The most I've spent on a book (ive only bought 3 over two years- its called a library and a photocopier guys) was £20.