Marlys

After 3 years of college my son has only had to buy 1 book from the bookstore. He has purchased all the rest from Amazon and has not had any problems. Then he sells the ones he doesn't want to keep on Craigslist. It has saved us a lot of money! My daughter starts college this fall and we will do the same thing for her - as soon as they post which books she needs.
We bought his sheets & things like that from Overstock.com.
Good luck!

purplemem

Microsoft office offers a college edition. At our school, we had to buy it from the computer lab to get the discount, but it was $100 less. Check with your school before you buy it.

Alu_Rathbone

There are sites that offer the service. I'm looking at all options, I need to!

And I'm doing another survey of cost for all items... Like for my computer, I'm looking at the clearance section on Best Buy and looking at school discounts and what not.

For the other things, I'm looking around. Mom and I would have started preparing for this last year, had we known I was going to get in! Thats okay though!

brighmet

I have 2 kids that just graduated from college in May (yeah). I found a place that rents books by the semester. The website is
www.chegg.com. I think I saved around $1000 for the 2 years that we rented books. It may be worth it to check them out. They were buying the books from the bookstore and at the end of the semester selling them back but were either getting very minimal money back or the professor were changing books the next semester and the bookstore would not back them back.

Also you said you needed to get some Microsoft software. You should check with the bookstore or technology department. You should be able to buy that software for $20 or so. Microsoft has some kind of deal with the colleges.

Good luck with the book buying and with college in general.

ToucanSam

Sometimes you can get away with using the previous edition of a book since they rarely change much. I know I did that with classes like psychology and such. You can buy a prior edition sometimes for as little as a few bucks.

MistyMarie

As a teacher, I buy most of my software from journeyed.com

They give GREAT discounts to higher education students if you can prove you are attending classes.

I am taking some distance learning courses and found most of my books on half.com and cheapestbooks.com. Otherwise, I would have had to pay WAY too much at the college bookstore.

Alu_Rathbone

I can get the Microsoft Office Professional (Normally around 300 or more) for 80 bucks through their student discount thing. WHich is awesome, cause I'll have everything I'll need for school, and then some. They didn't offer the home and student though. Ah well... I'm going to find out more though.

Thanks!

joyceelaine1951

I got a refurbished Dell Inspirion for 399.00 on the dell website. It is loaded has all the dings and whistles in it. You might want to check that out. there's a whole list of different styles of dell at the whare house sight where things have either been sent back or never picked up.

Candace

Just be careful with used books. I used to buy them used but only if I could handle them and look through them beforehand. We had used book sales and swaps through UCD. Sometimes people get so crazy with highlighting and notes etc. the books become too hard to read!

MadQuilter

That would be my advice as well.