7 Ways to Save Money as a Freshman

In your freshman year, college seems like a key to freedom. The first year away from home can be the most empowering and terrifying year of your life!
It starts off all nice and dandy – your own apartment or dorm room, cool newroommates replace annoying siblings, parties carry on without curfews. Credit cards get swiped left, right and center and before you know it, you could be in a huge pile of debt by the time you graduate.
According to Alexa von Tobel, personal finance expert, credit card debt in college senior amounts to about $4,000 on an average from credit cards, without counting $30,000 in student debt.
Start early and nip the spending in the bud. Establish a simple and practical plan for your expenditure and start save money as a freshman. Here are 7 quintessential tips to save money in your freshman year:

1. Make a Budget, Check It Twice
The easiest way to spend money is to lose track of it. If you’re getting a certain amount every month from you part-time job or your parents (lucky bum!) make sure you have a plan as to how you’re going to spend it. Rent, food and transport take up a major chunk.  Once you subtract the essentials, you have a clearer idea of how much disposable income you have at hand. Always withdraw in small amount, so your wallet has just enough for the week and you avoid overspending.

2. Get Appwise
Making a budget is as good as making a New Year’s resolution! It can all collapse unless you take action to execute it. Dollarbird and Expensify are great expense tracking apps for your iPhone. Try Pennies or You Need a Budget for a more detailed look at your spending habits. Keep a tally of every bill on your phone and get reports every month.

3. Don’t Spend. Invest.
While buying a high priced item, like a laptop or a mobile phone, make sure it’s durable, it has a decent warranty and it comes with the latest software. This way you won’t have to bother about buying a new one until you’re out of college. While choosing which items to invest in and which ones to go low cost, just think of how many years you would like to be using the product.

4. Rent textbooks
Avoid your college bookstore, where textbooks are known to be marked-up for convenience.  Rent books online at TextbookRecycling.com (they donate to charity from every sale) or even better rent the more expensive textbooks from BookRenter.com for a semester or entire year.

5. Take advantage of student perks
studentuniverse.com helps you save on travel. They even offer deals on J Crew and iTunes. A free 6 months membership to Amazon Prime and 25% cashback on Lenovo PCs are perks meant only for students. Take advantage of your ID, whenever and wherever you can! Cafeteria meals and college meal plans can save you a wad of cash and they’re usually much healthier than outside food.

6. Avoid the spend crowd
This could be one of the toughest challenges. Peer pressure leads to an unnecessary amount of spending and it’s harder than you think to avoid hanging with the spend crowd. Having to drop out of a holiday/party plans can be a tough call. But avoiding the crowd that parties more than studies could go a long way in saving the big buck.

7. Carpool
Pool your resources. This happens most often with roomies and the fridge but it could extend to your fuel budget as well. Cut down on individual expenses by using a common car to get to your campus every day.

5 Things You Never Knew About World-Famous Dropouts

It’s no longer surprising to hear that some of the richest people in the world are college dropouts. Almost 16% of the 400 wealthiest Americans did not graduate college. Of course, statistically speaking, those who complete college make way more money than those who don’t. For obvious reasons, being a graduate gives you an edge when it comes to getting a job and staying employed. Yet most of us can’t help but be inspired by the ones that choose to drop-out saving precious time and money to fuel their extraordinary dreams.

Look up the 5 wealthiest drop outs and you’ll find a billion reasons why they have the most aspirational success stories. But here’s something you didn’t know about these rolling-in-dough masterminds:

1. Bill Gates:

Gates spent most of his college life fishing out crumpled listings of operating systems from the garbage bin outside the Computer Science Center and coding away to glory. It’s a lesser known fact that he actually had enough credits to graduate but decided against it, as he was already successful after 2 short years at Harvard.

2. Mark Zuckerberg:

Born with a silver spoon in his mouth, this social media magnate was once the nerdiest kid in college. You wouldn’t want to invite him to parties or take him on a date. In the early years of Facebook, he in fact spent considerable sums of money tackling litigations related to problems created by his friends, who were promised senior positions in the company. Today, he is one of the youngest billionaires.

3. Lawrence Ellison:

The CEO and Co-founder of Oracle Corporation has a traditional superhero story – his dad was an air force pilot and he never met his mom until he was 48! Believe it or not his Jewish mom was never married and he was given away at the age of 9 months  to be brought up by his uncle and aunt in New York. Batman, much?

4. Michael Dell:

Investing in stocks since the age of 7, Dell’s favorite toy was a calculator. He dropped out of the pre-medical program at the University of Texas because it just wasn’t challenging enough for his keen business mind. Just imagine your laptop might not have existed if he had gone ahead and become a doctor!

5. Marc Rich:

Having that surname sure has its advantages! Founder of Glencore, Rich was indicted for tax evasion, but later famously pardoned on Bill Clinton’s last day in office. What you didn’t know is that his most expensive investment was his wife! He met Denise Eisenberg on a blind date and they were married for 30 long years. Ten years after the divorce it was discovered that, Denise had over 140 million USD protected from scrutiny in the form of a trust, which included a Learjet 60 and a yacht called the “Lady Joy.”