The Oldest Kid Pays the Most for Textbooks

In case you're new around here, or if you didn't already know, I'm the oldest of 6 kids. My youngest brother is almost 10, then I have a sister in high school, a brother and a sister in college, and a sister who just recently graduated college. I graduated from college in 2010 and from law school in 2013. As the oldest sometimes you and your parents kind have to learn things through trial and error. For example, my punishments were way harsher (I'd get my cell phone taken away for weeks at a time and they'd give it to my 10 year old sister to play with and she'd change all the names of my contacts to Big Bird and Batman.. whaaaat?! They'd never do that to my 15 year old sister now.. if hers is taken away for 15 minutes she loses her mind!) --Thanks a lot Mom and Dad! haha

I like the being the oldest though, it makes me kind of a leader. But the one reason I wish I wasn't the oldest was because I was the first to go through the craziness that is college, and boy, navigating admissions and costs and all that is a lot of work and it would have been nice to have a sibling who went before me to lead the way. Textbook buying is no exception on the craziness front! $200+ for a textbook from the bookstore is no joke! I ended up creating spreadsheets and calculating the costs of the bookstore versus websites online. This is definitely an area of college life I wish I could have improved on because I wasted a LOT of time and energy (not to mention $$$) trying to buy books at the cheapest price.

One piece of advice I have since learned since graduating college and law school is to rent books, I mean c'mon, let's save be environmental and save some trees people; you know you're never going to look at that textbook ever again. Also, I would advise people to never pay shipping! What a rip off. Seriously, I hate paying shipping and will often not buy stuff online (shirts, candles, headbands, books, whatever) if shipping is not included. I mean how hard is it for them to include the cost shipping in the price?! I just feel better when I look at the shipping cost and it says $0. haha maybe I'm cheap but that's just me. 

Anyways, now I have a good tip for my siblings-- check out www.CampusBookRentals.com where you can rent text books at 40-90% off the purchase price and shipping is FREE both ways. Plus, you can highlight all over the textbooks as if they were your own, which is totally awesome considering in law school I went through multiple highlighters PER WEEK (we had to read a lot of cases, okay? haha). The rental periods are flexible depending on your schedule, and they also have a new program called RentBack where you can rent your textbooks to other students (you can make 2-4x more $$ than with regular buyback programs).

So check them out and you wont be sorry. Plus, they've partnered with Operation Smile and a donation is made with the purchase of every textbook! Smiles are so important, they are definitely the first thing I notice about a person, and a charity that helps a child smile is a worthy one in my book. 

The only other advice I have for college students right now is to beware of the main campus dining hall. Everyone at my college called ours "Scurve" (seriously, I don't even remember the real name of the dining hall) because we said it gave you scurvy.. plus it made your clothes smell SO BAD that everyone knew you ate there for hours afterwards. I'm not kidding, I Febreezed people before they came into my dorm room because I didn't want to smell the stench!! 

If you have any other advice for college students, leave it in the comments :-) 

**This is a sponsored post but all opinions are my own, because believe you me, there is nothing I hate more than being told what to do or say! haha**