My next semester of college starts up this Thursday! I’m super excited to get through school, but it can be stressful. Mainly, paying for everything. If you are in school or have college aged kids, you know the drill. You have to shell out thousands for tuition (or take out loans and put yourself in debt before you even have a good career), pay rent at your apartment or dorm, drop another couple hundred on meal plans– and on top of that, there are textbooks. My usual cost is around $400-$500 a semester. That’s as much as one month’s rent! Or at least, I USED to pay that much. Once you’ve been in school for a while, you start to learn that the university book store is usually NOT a good idea. There are tons of other ways to get textbooks for way cheaper. This post by Christina Brown at the Northern Cheapskate has some useful tips:
-Trade or borrow books with a friend
-Check to see if it’s in the library or online!
(I got extremely lucky last semester. Two of my textbooks were in the school library and I was able to check them out for a few months at a time! Voila! Free books.)
-Try Freecycle.
-ALWAYS buy used when you can
-Renting will also save you
-Check out college bulletin boards
-Check online at Amazon, Chegg, Craigslist, and Facebook.
I’d like to add my own to this list—Check out thrift stores and other used book stores. If you’re looking for a book for a gen ed class, you can sometimes get lucky. I went to Goodwill with a friend one time, and she found a $150 Intro to Spanish book there for $3.