Suddenly Frugal Blog

In lieu of my normal Freebie Friday posts, I am running this, the the third and final installment on money-saving ways to secure books for college.

As mentioned in my earlier posts on Wednesday and Thursday, this information comes from the sample chapter I wrote for a book idea I’d proposed to Adams Media–Cash for College: The Suddenly Frugal Guide to Financing a Child’s Education. Unfortunately, Adams, which has published both Suddenly Frugal: How to Live Happier and Healthier for Less and Toss, Keep, Sell!: The Suddenly Frugal Guide to Cleaning Out the Clutter and Cashing In, didn’t feel the same enthusiasm for the book’s potential that I did. Nonetheless, I wanted to share what I believe to be worthy information with people who might most need it–readers of this blog.

Today’s blog posting shows how students who are organized and disciplined enough can get through a semester at college without spending a dime on books. That’s because they borrow them from the library.

It’s a little-known fact that most college and university libraries stock nearly all the books that professors assign–from the textbooks they are teaching out of to the novels you may be reading in an English class. The borrowing approach works best if your college library belongs to a consortium of sorts–so that if the library on your campus doesn’t have the book you need, you can search for and request it from another library in that consortium. One college student I know was able to do this borrowing dance for all the books she needed for her courses and saved about $800 per semester! Granted, she was constantly checking out and renewing these books throughout the semester. But for her it was worth it to her to spend this time to save that amount of money.

Finally, don’t forget that you can get money back for any textbooks you spend money on, with the government’s tax credit for textbooks. To qualify you must file an annual tax return. At that time you can apply for a tax credit to get reimbursed for up to $2,500 in college expenses, including textbooks, via the American Opportunity Tax Credit, which is part of the same legislation that brought you Cash for Clunkers.

Not as many freebies as I’d hoped I would find to tie into Labor Day. Nonetheless, here are a few worth mentioning:

• Get free Turkey Hill ice cream and free admission for union members on the Battleship New Jersey on Saturday, September 4th in the Philadelphia area!
• Also from Philadelphia: Amy Buckman from 6ABC shares a tip on how you can snag a free calendar for 2011.
• Automotive works in Michigan can enjoy a free cup of Dunkin Donuts coffee on Monday, September 6th, Labor Day.
  
• Free food for the kids on Monday, September 6th, at some Applebee’s restaurants in upstate New York!
• Free dinner and a movie Saturday night (September 6th) in Somerset County, New Jersey.
• Look at all the free things to do in Chicago this Labor Day Weekend!
• Check out this US News and World Report article for free shipping and other Labor Day deals.
• Through this Saturday, September 4th, you can get a FREE flu shot when you spend at least $30 on Procter & Gamble products (like Bounty, Tide, Pampers and more).

For more ideas on freebies, I would suggest plugging in the terms “Labor Day” and “free” and “your location” and “whatever it is you want to find for free” in your favorite search engine and see what comes up!

(I don’t know why I end so many of these sentences with exclamation points. I guess I’m just excited to share these freebies with you! See, I just did it again.)

In yesterday’s post I explained how my latest book idea–called Cash for College–crashed and burned when Adams Media passed on publishing it. Also, I’d explained how I decided to share some of the money-saving advice I’d uncovered when researching and writing the proposal, especially when it comes to college textbooks, which set the average college student back nearly $1,200 a year!

In today’s post I’ll give you the inside scoop on the latest money-saving ways to secure books for the college semester–which in this instance are textbook rentals.

Renting textbooks, in my opinion, makes so much more sense than the old system: buying brand-new textbooks, using them for the semester and then selling them back to the college bookstore for a fraction of what you’d paid for them new. With textbook rentals you pay a one-time fee for the rental, and you’re good to go.

You can rent textbooks online or through your college bookstore. One such company offering online textbook rentals is Chegg.com. There, for example, you can rent a biology textbook for the semester for only $49. If you were to buy it new, it would be $186. Your only other cost? Shipping, which is usually less than $5; at the end of the semester Chegg.com sends you a postage-paid shipping label so you can return the book on Chegg’s dime.

Traditional bookseller Barnes & Noble, which has taken over management of nearly 640 college bookstores nationwide, got into the textbook rental business this year. No surprise there, since they were losing business to online sites that were filling this much-needed niche. According to Barnes & Noble students will pay 50 percent less than the cover price for each textbook they rent–hardly the bargain that online outfitters like Chegg.com offers–but they will allow for more flexibility within their rental agreements, which can add up to big savings in the long run.

Whereas Chegg.com considers a book that is written in to be “damaged”–and therefore will charge you the full price of the book, minus your rental fee, when you return the book–Barnes & Noble will be more lenient with highlighting and note taking, and won’t penalize you for this when you return the books. (Maybe they developed this policy because they were used to the state of written-in books that they would buy back from students at the end of one semester and then resell to other students the next semester.)

The bottom line when renting textbooks: make sure you read the agreement in full, including the fine print, and consider the “total” cost of the rental when doing price comparisons. For example, if you know that you’re a voracious note taker and highlighter when it comes to your college textbooks, the more expensive rental fee from Barnes & Noble may make more sense, given your study habits. However, if you’re just interested in using your textbooks as reference materials, with no in-the-margin scribbling necessary, then choosing the cheaper rental price may be the right choice for you.

Other companies that offer textbook rentals that you can compare with Chegg.com and Barnes and Noble include:

• Bookrenter.com
• Campusbookrentals.com
• Ecampus.com
• Textbookrentals.com
• Collegebookrenter.com

Tomorrow’s post: borrowing your books from the library!

Last month I pitched Adams Media, publisher of Suddenly Frugal: How to Live Happier and Healthier for Less and Toss, Keep, Sell!: The Suddenly Frugal Guide to Cleaning Out the Clutter and Cashing In, what I hoped would be the  third book in the Suddenly Frugal series. Called Cash for College: The Suddenly Frugal Guide to Financing a Child’s Education, it was pitched as a book that would help real-life parents figure out creative ways to cuts costs, sock away cash and, ultimately, pay to send their kids to college.

Unfortunately, Adams passed on the idea.

As I do with any book proposal I write, I created a sample chapter to give the publisher a sense of my voice and writing style. Not one to let good work go to waste, in the next three days I’m going to run a portion of that sample chapter, which happens to be on a timely topic–especially if your kid is starting his/her college semester this week: getting college textbooks for as little dough as possible.

Today’s post is how you can save money buying your college books online.

According to the College Board (the company that administers the SATs), the national average for annual textbook spending alone at four-year public colleges in 2009-10 is $1,122. But clever college students don’t need to pay nearly anything close to that number when securing books for the semester. One option is buying books online.

Like with most things you buy online, college students can often get the best price on textbooks when they leave the college bookstore and log onto the Internet. Believe it or not, Amazon.com has a huge array of college textbooks for sale–from college physics textbooks to physical education–with new prices that are better than you can find in a college store.

Before you put any textbooks in your online shopping cart, though, make sure you do some comparison shopping. For this I would recommend using price-comparison sites, such as Bigwords.com or Campusbooks.com. To make this work, you plug in a book’s ISBN, or if you don’t have that, the book’s title, and the internal “search engines” on these sites will sniff out the best prices online for that book.

Another trick that many college students have recently discovered–buying the international version of a college textbook, rather than the American version. How do you do this? Instead of logging onto Amazon.com (the “.com” ending being the U.S.-based bookseller’s website), for example, instead visit Amazon.co.uk–the British version of Amazon.com.

A New York Times article reported that students who’ve tried this trick were able to get a textbook retailing in the United-States for $120 for only $50, just by ordering from the international version of a website. Even with $25 for shipping, they still saved money overall. The same article also said that except for a stamp on the cover pronouncing the textbook to be the “international” version and some variations in spelling–such as the British spelling of “favour” for the English word “favor”–the textbooks were nearly identical to the ones retailing in stateside college bookstores.

Many students also swear by Half.com, a site where you can finds millions of used books for sale, including college textbooks, often for more than half off what you would pay at another online site. And don’t forget about Amazon Marketplace for finding used or older versions–and cheaper, too–of the book on your required reading list.

Speaking of older versions of a textbook, often the best way to save the most is to buy a slightly outdated edition. While many professors may not encourage this practice openly–and neither will the textbook companies that rely on the revenue stream from newer textbooks–the truth is that when most textbooks get updated, the new information is so marginal as not to really affect your learning in the long run. In fact, sometimes the information on the inside is exactly the same but only the cover has changed–for example, with images to reflect current events, as might be the case with a history textbook.

Another reason a textbook might have a new “edition”? Because now it comes with new accessories, such as a CD-ROM. Now if you need this CD-ROM as part of your class assignments, then this “buying old” approach won’t work–unless you can find the CD-ROM version in you school library so you can check it out as needed.

Tomorrow I’ll cover textbook rentals!

We finished up our back-to-school shopping today, with one visit to the store only. That’s because I was able to shop at home first without spending a dime.

You see for the past few years I’ve been stockpiling school supplies. Basically, I’ve been approaching this supply stash in two ways.

1. At the end of the previous school year, I search through all the supplies that my daughters have brought home and which I can recycle/reuse the next year.
2. When stores are offering penny deals, I’ll stock up on supplies that I know we’ll eventually need.

You’ve heard me give this advice before but it’s worth repeating: before we hit up Staples, I took my daughter’s supply list and had her use it as she went through all of the leftover supplies in our stash. Once she determined what we didn’t have, we headed out to the store.

Of the supply list that was 30-plus items long, we had to purchase 9 items only. They were:

• 4 packs of pens (blue, black and red–the black ones were this week’s penny deal)
• 2 packs of Scotch tape
• 1 pack of mechanical pencils
• 1 pencil-holding compass
• 1 Texas Instruments calculator

All told, we spend $20.78 out of pocket on back-to-school supplies. I say “out of pocket” because I had a $9.75 Staples Extra Rewards coupon that I was able to apply to my purchase.

Here’s a bonus to all of this: while searching for the school supplies we already owned, I came across more loose change, which added up to $39. Cha-ching!

I’m not in the market for a new car right now but maybe you are. That’s why I thought you would find this information from Cars.com to be helpful.

According to the site, Labor Days is when car dealers and manufacturers are unveiling sales specials to help move what’s left of the 2010 model year inventory. And these are the 10 best deals for consumers based on cash and loan incentives.

1. 2010 Grand Cherokee: $5,500 cash back ($1,500 dealer incentive) or 0% APR (up to 72 months) plus $1,000 cash back
2. 2010 Chevrolet HHR: $4,000 cash back (up to $5,000 dealer incentive) or 0% APR (up to 60 months)
3. 2010 Chevrolet Cobalt, Malibu: $3,000 cash back (up to $5,000 dealer incentive) or 0% APR (up to 60 months)
4. 2010 Chevrolet Impala: $4,000 cash back (up to $5,000 dealer incentive) or 0% APR (up to 72 months)
5. 2010 Nissan Altima Hybrid: $4,500 cash back or 0% APR (up to 60 months)
6. 2010 BMW 650i: $12,500 dealer incentive and 0.9% APR (up to 72 months)
7. 2010 BMW 5 Series (includes M5): $4,500-$7,000 dealer incentive and 0.9% APR (up to 60 months)
8. 2010 Infiniti FX35, FX50: $4,000-$7,000 dealer incentive, 0.9% APR (up to 60 months)
9. 2010 Lincoln Navigator: $3,500 cash back ($6,000 dealer incentive) or 0% APR plus $1,000 cash back for 36 months
10. 2010 Volvo XC70: $2,000-$5,000 dealer incentive and 0% APR 72 months

So what do you think–are these incentives enough to make you want to buy a new car?

I was in New York City today, filming this “Good Day New York: Street Talk” segment, on behalf of KIWI Shoe Care. This is the last in my series of back-to-school savings segments.

Well, summer is officially over in our house, now that the kids have gone back to school. But that doesn’t mean that you/we can’t still enjoy some freebies!

FREE FOOD

• Families can indulge with free scoops of Breyers Original All Natural Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough or Homemade Vanilla ice cream Sunday, Aug. 29, 1 – 5 p.m. at Kids Fest, Triangle Town Center, 5959 Triangle Town Blvd., Raleigh, N.C.
• Become a fan of Regal Cinemas on Facebook and you’ll get a coupon for free movie popcorn August 27-29th! (Thanks to Ft. Lauderdale on the Cheap for a heads up on this deal.)
• Check out this coupon for free Brueggers Bagels and Cream Cheese!
• Use FourSquare and like to eat at Chili’s? Then you’ll love this: when you check in on FourSquare when you’re at Chili’s, you’ll get a free appetizer of chips and salsa.
• At participating Wendy’s locations, you can purchase a Dave Thomas Foundation keychain for $1 and then enjoy a free Frosty Jr. (with purchase) through October 31st.

FREE FUN

• Madame Tussauds Washington D.C. is offering free admission to all Washington D.C.-, Virginia- and Maryland-licensed teachers (must show license) through August 28.
• Kids can hit the lanes for free games this summer at all 93 Brunswick Zone and Brunswick Zone XL centers. Every day this summer, students age 18 and younger can bowl one free game whenever lanes are available. Shoe rental is not included. To claim their games, students just need a Student Ball Pass, which you can get for free at any Brunswick center or online here.

FREE STUFF

• Make a reservation for free spa services at the Botanicals Salon & Spa in Clayton, NC this Friday, August 27th and Saturday, August 28th. One free 30-minute service is available per customer. (Wish I lived closer so I could take advantage of this freebie!)
• I don’t normally cover giveaways but this BIC Pen promotion mentioned on Bargain Babe was too good to ignore: Every day through Sept. 9, 2010, BIC is giving away 1,000 Easy Glide pens starting at 12 noon EST.

Yesterday I wrote about my desire to track down spare change to help pay for our upcoming bathroom renovation. I mean, it doesn’t hurt to have a few extra bucks in my pocket, especially when it’s found money, right?

So I’m pleased to report that during my spare change challenge, which took me all of about an hour–most of the time was spent counting–I found $47.08. While that doesn’t quite add up to the Coinstar statement that the average American household has $90 in spare change, I’m pretty happy with the amount I did find.

If you think collecting spare change is just chump change, consider this: a Suddenly Frugal reader wrote to let me know that she and her husband have been collecting spare change since their son was born four years ago. In that time, they’ve managed to sock away close to $2,000–just from spare change. This is all going into their son’s college savings account. I think it’s brilliant and congratulations to them.

So, did you do your own spare change challenge? How much did you end up finding?

It’s been awhile since I last did a hunt around my house for spare change. I know this because yesterday I began noticing how many coins have been piling up in various places in my home.

The timing is perfect to embark on a spare change challenge since we’re getting ready to do the final push of our house renovation–the bathroom that my daughters use, well used to use; it’s been down to the studs for the last two years and simply not on top of our priority list. Since then four of us have been sharing one full bath. With two teenage girls, let me tell you, it hasn’t been pretty.

I figure we’re going to need all the extra money we can find to pay for the renovation and the fixtures we have to buy (toilet, sinks, shower stall, etc.). So this morning I started hunting in the usual places for spare change–the laundry room, my bedroom, the cup holders in the car, the bottom of my pocketbook–and came up with a plastic container full of quarters, dimes, nickels and pennies. I’m going to spend this afternoon counting it all out and then tomorrow I’ll report on how much I found.

In the meantime why don’t you embark on your own spare change challenge. Then post a comment to let us know how much “extra” money you found around the house. It will be interesting to see the amounts of found money we end up, well, finding!