How to Save Money When Buying College Textbooks

It's that time of the year again when college begins and there is a mad scramble to buy textbooks for courses. Suffering from first time sticker shock when you look at the astronomical textbooks, whether as a parent of a freshman or a neophyte freshman wandering into the college bookstore for the first time? You're not alone.

Cosumerist has two recent blog postings that you might be interested in. The first post warns you about how textbook publishers are fighting the used book market by pushing high-priced "textbook packets." The second post, College Textbooks: Shop Around, Ask Yor Professor, And Save offers tips and strategies on saving money when buying college textbooks.

Here are my tips for saving money on textbooks, from my own experiences many years ago as a perpetually broke graduate student:

1. If you're on campus, head over to the campus bookstore, look up the textbooks assigned for your courses, take note of the ISBNs, and then hit the web (Amazon, etc) to see whether you can find a used edition at a lower price. In particular, Amazon Marketplace is filled with students flooding the market with textbooks they don't want to keep.
   


2. If it is a bundled package, try e-mailing your professor or TA to find out what exactly is in the bundle, and what you really need for the course.


3. If the current edition is too expensive, you could buy an older edition but check with your professor or TA before doing so. I doubt that there are major changes in Philosophy or Literature textbooks, but you might need the latest information for your engineering or psychology courses.


4. Look up your college bulletin boards, textbook exchanges, etc. There might be students who are looking to sell off their previously used textbooks.

Frugal Living & Planning for College

One of the biggest bill a family will face, besides buying a home, is college education. The average price of college education in the U.S. has risen well above the average rate of inflation. For the longest time, families cope with the ever rising cost of college by drawing equity from their homes or borrowing ever larger amounts of student loans, especially from private lenders. But with the collapse of the housing and financial sectors, many families are being forced to rethink their college planning strategies.

What if you are the frugal sort with no intention of going into massive debt to finance your offspring's education? What if you are heading to college and not wanting to graduate with a heavy debt load?

It comes as no surprise that many families and their kids are looking more and more toward the public university as an affordable choice that offers value-for-money college education. But as a recent Money Magazine article warns us, with soaring applications and diminishing state budgets, public universities may not be the panacea to college tuition sticker shock.

So what can you do about the ever rising college tuition bill? An earlier Money Magazine article, Ease the Tuition Squeeze offers six tips for dealing with this dilemma:

1. use your savings strategically
2. apply higher - and lower
3. play it safer
4. borrow smart
5. make tuition less taxing
6. stop worrying (at least for now)
   

Links:

• The Trouble With Public Colleges
• Ease the Tuition Squeeze