Today’s reader tip comes from Victoria. She has a great suggestion for saving money on college textbooks by renting them.
If any of your other readers are in college or have kids in college, I wanted to tell you about a very positive experience my daughter had last semester.
We are paying for her tuition, but she is responsible for all other expenses – including room and board and books. She works during the summer and a bit during the year to pay for all of this, but her budget is tight and we are really working with her to not get into credit card debt.
One of her biggest hurdles is the cost of textbooks. One semester her bill was over $1000 just on books! This past semester, on the advice from some friends of hers, she decided to look into renting her books, rather than buying them. There are a few that she thought she’d want to own, but the rest of them (like the basic textbooks), she rented through BookRenter.com.
Shipping was free and she paid about one-tenth of what she would have to buy them new from the campus book store. She was also able to sell some of her old textbooks back to them (for them to rent out), as long as they were in good condition. She told me she made a few hundred dollars that way.
She is happy and so are we. I just thought I’d pass this along, as we hadn’t hear of the company until she used them.
I love this tip! And Victoria is right – college textbooks can be extremely expensive!
Have you had a good experience with renting textbooks, buying them second hand, or selling back your old textbooks? Let me know in the comments section – I am going to work on a round-up of reviews on sites you can use to save money on college textbooks.
(And in the meantime, here are some ways I like to save money on books.)
While getting my master’s degree, I was usually able to buy the books used on http://www.half.com and then sell them at the end of the semester for the SAME PRICE. I have used this site for years. Make sure you either pay for expedited shipping, or order 2 weeks before the semester starts, since Media Mail shipping is a little slow.
Someone told me that the best site to use is http://bigwords.com. Apparently they search all the other book selling/renting websites and find the cheapest one. Disclaimer: I have not had time yet to play around with it to see if it really does all that etc.
When my daughter went to a seminary college program, one of her classmates told her about thriftbooks.com We were able to get a few of her books there for a fraction of what the school offered them for. My daughter asked the professor of one class if it was okay to use a different edition (it was a few years older than the current one), and he said it was fine. Afterwards, she was able to sell them to girls entering seminary. By the way, I’ve also had good luck finding other books at this site. I got a Susie Fishbein cookbook there.