| Confessions of a Broke College Kid | Let's Talk Textbooks |

Here's the funny thing, I haven't even started college yet and I've already made a few mistakes.  Now, if you're gonna make mistakes in life you might as well use them to your benefit and learn from them.  If you don't learn from them, well, you keep making them over and over again and in my case that might prove quite costly.  My college tuition was due this past monday so when I made it home from work I immediately started making sure all my ducks were in line.  Tuition, check.  Talk on phone with Financial Aid Office for 20 minutes, check.  Wait on hold with Social Security Administration for 40 minutes, check.  Oh wait, better check my student email like they've advised us to.

Books required for Accounting 101.

Textbooks, not check.  Oh brother.  Of course this doesn't surprise me, If there were any special skills I had acquired over my past years of schooling it would be procrastination.  What I should of done was checked my student email about 3 weeks ago, got the list, and then proceeded to call mom so she could search all of her trusty sources for some cheap college material.  Nope.  I like a challenge. I also like having no money, apparently. I call Justin: "Hey I need to go by the campus bookstore today and get my books."  "I can just go pick them up for you."  He's so sweet.  One hour later I'm on my way to Columbia with twenty dollars in my fuel tank praying that will last me until Thursday.

"Do you know how much those books were?"  Oh, shoot.
 "Uh, a lot?"
"389 dollars"  Oh man, that's worse than I thought.

389 dollars later I'm left with a meager 25 dollars in my checking account.  Moral of this story?  Check used book stores,  check Amazon, check Ebay, check ANYWHERE ELSE before you decide to buy brand new books for classes. (Amazon.com has this cool feature where you can rent college textbooks for a semester, and it's about 1 million times cheaper than buying brand new.)  Oh, and don't do all of this two days before your classes start. Of course, the bright side of all of this is, one, it's funny. . . who needs money anyways? Two, I can resell them back to the school when I'm done.  So that's nice.

My parents tried to tell me, but I didn't listen.
Okay, no, always listen to your parents. They usually know best.  Or just take this guy's word for it.