Buying School Supplies on a Budget
Posted by kahlees on February 3, 2008
It never fails. At the beginning of every school semester I blow tons of money on new school supplies. I need new pens, pencils, notebooks, binders, paper… Cheap textbooks would be a welcome relief, but they’re so pricey even when you compare the different web sites and stores. (I want to shoot somebody every time we rarely or never use one of the books that a professor assigns us.) Most of my cheap school supplies I’m able to just find online. In my off time, I tutor younger kids. Most of them have parents that can afford to buy them school supplies and materials, but there are plenty that have troubles finding elementary and middle budget school supplies. And of course, it always seems like every math teacher requires a different calculator. How they can require you to fork out the dough for expensive TI Graphing calculators I’ll never know.
john said
Agreed, last semester I blew $500 on books alone (and thats USED books bought online from the best prices I could find)
Ryan said
I have a TI 83 calculator sitting in front of me on sale for next to nothing
Isobel Wren said
I get my textbooks at half.com. It’s an ebay site but if you go to the campus bookstore ahead of time and copy the ISBNs on the books you need you can enter them into half.com and get your books way cheaper than at the campus bookstore.
A trick I learned was that if the book has JUST been turned over to the new edition and nothing has changed you can use the old edition and save even MORE money on half. Ask your professors if they have the syllabus for the previous semester. Most of them will still have it and probably haven’t changed the assignments.