Bargain shopping for college

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I spent the summer watching my niece and almost-son prepare to go to college.  The last of the two, my niece leaves in the morning.  As I have a child starting college in the fall, and another the next year, I am very interested in the process of gearing up to go to college.  It just looks plain expensive.  


Being the consummate planner, I have purchased two trunks and have began to put things aside for my son.  This way, I can purchase items he will need on clearance, and pay less than what I am watching others pay.  I am excited about the prospect of having an excuse to budget shop for the next two year.  


The subject of textbooks is a bit scary to me though.  First, the amount of time you have to shop for college books is severely limited. You don't get your textbook list until a week or two before school at most.  Second, there are no clearance sales to help you stockpile textbooks.


My friend did have some success at getting textbooks for less than half price from Amazon.com.  There were ebook options and used book options.  The only problem was shipping time for the books in print.  If you have a source for a great textbook option, please drop a note.

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6:22 AM
Anonymous said…
We've not had any time difficulty with ordering textbooks. We order used when available and new when they aren't - both through Amazon. They key to reducing costs for us has been right away at the end of the semester relisting books that we don't want to hold on to. Writing a good listing on Amazon(making it clear the book's condition and emphasizing no writing and good spine if that is the case). Occasionally the edition will change and you are out of luck, but most of the time you should be able to resell books for a pretty good return of what you pay for them. Just to give a typical example: Bookstore lists book for $150, Amazon new for $110, used for $65. So, even if you buy it new you should be able to get quite a bit of your money back out of it. We look at rentals every semester but they have yet to be as good a deal as buying and reselling.
6:17 PM
Unknown said…
Some universities have the books listed for each course on the bookstore website. You are able to take the ISBN from the college bookstore site, and then search for the books on other websites such as Chegg (which allows you to rent the book for maybe 30% of the purchase cost), Amazon, and textbook sites. There is also another site that lets a student rent books, but I cannot remember the domain name.
10:29 AM
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