When the new semester is about to begin, students will gather a syllabus and trudge off to the recommended bookstores in the area. This regular activity could have a dreadful effect on our financial condition, especially because many students have zero to little income. As we are waiting for the damage, we may find that getting those thick textbook hurt us a lot financially. When a semester finally ends, most textbooks are useless and we need only a few of them. Eventually, we will need to brace ourselves for another syllabus and purchase more textbooks. It may feel that we are being ripped off over and over again. A prized textbook may cost us $100 and in used condition at the end of the semester, it could fetch us for only $15 or even lower. For cash-strapped students, this is almost a criminal system. Many students simply can’t help to participate in this kind of farce. Fortunately, with proper methods, the cyclical situation could finally end. There are a number of simple steps that we can take at the beginning, so we should be able to save more at the beginning of the semester. Equally, we should also look for ways to get back more from our investment at the end of the semester.
It’s important for us to create a list of textbook, so we should be able to determine the amount of money that we could spend. It means that we should be able to get prepared much sooner. It is important to find alternative books that we may use. In many cases, we are required to use specific textbook, but in some classes, there could be an opportunity to use different books, which could be cheaper. Other than buying from local bookstores, we could also purchase them from online stores; however we should make sure that the shipping costs and taxes won’t negate much of the lower prices. There are many online bookstores that provide used textbooks at good conditions. Some of them provide larger selection and may offer a package depending on syllabus provided by major universities and colleges. We should be able to perform comparison shopping in different online stores to know whether we already make significant savings. We should be able to avoid expensive and ridiculous amount of money spend for this purposes. Then the semester ends, we should do the opposite and look for sellers who will agree to purchase our used books. It is important to know that they will accept books with good conditions, so we should preserve it whenever we can.
Depending on the printing year, the textbook will continue to decline in terms of value; so we should accept if the amount of money we get is much less. Even so, the money can still be used for buying used books for the next semester. In general, we should use common sense so we are able to determine the amount of money that we should spend; preferably at much lower values. We should be able to become more responsible financially and it would be much better if we have part-time jobs that allow us to earn some amount of money.
