Recoup Your Educational Budget
What are you going to spend on college? Do you have any idea? Well, there are a number of factors you need to consider. There’s the cost of travel, the cost of housing, the cost of educational materials, and the cost of tuition.
Travel
If you live in California and you’re going to school in Colorado, you’re looking at travel to and from the city where you’re studying. If you go there your freshman year and come back your senior year, you’re looking at between $400 and $800, depending on how inexpensively you’re able to travel. Hit the dorms with a backpack from a Taxi, and catch a cheap flight.
If you drive, you’ll pay for gas. You’ll also have to pay for food while you drive, and if it’s a long enough trip, you might even have to pay for lodging. If you stay on campus, you’re going to have to come home during summer and winter; which means in one 12 month period, you could drive to college and home twice. If it’s Colorado to Cali, that’s $800 a year. Multiplied by four, you’re looking at a minimum of $3,200 for four years.
Housing and Tuition
You can cut all that out by living in a communal housing situation off-campus; though these can be hard to find. That said, it’s possible to source monthly rent as low as $200 to $600, which could be cheaper than the dormitory. Do that four years, you can travel to college once, stay in the city through your studies, then leave when you’re done (or remain if you like).
You’ll be looking at between $9,600 and $38,400 for housing alone over four years. Tuition will be between about $5k and $30k, which means you’ll be looking at between $20k and $120k during your tenure as a student obtaining a BA. Then you’ve got food, which will be between $100 and $400 a month; which is between $4,800 and $19,200 over four years.
Educational Materials
After that you’ve got textbooks; you’ll need between 32 and 64 by the end of a four-year degree, likely. At $100 to $200 per book, you’ll be looking at between $3,200 and $12,800, total.
Costs Consolidated
Altogether, when you put these costs together the minimum “average” expenses you’ll be able to get away with paying for your four-year degree are going to be about $38,000, while on the higher “middle” end you’ll be looking at about $193,600. Yearly, you’re looking at between $9,500 and $48,400.
Cut down your travel expenses, cut down your housing expenses, eat cheaply, and buy used textbooks (then sell them when you’re done) and you can cut thousands from your yearly budget. Look at the $30k figure for tuition. If that’s what you’re paying yearly, but you do everything else bare minimum, you can go to a better college and still save. You can do $34,500 a year in a scenario that could be $48,400. Then you can recoup one or two grand by selling your books every year.
If you’re a wise student, you’re going to sell used textbooks; and when you go to do this, you’ll want a site that offers many buyers, like BookScouters.com, who has a platform that allows you to: “…quickly and easily find who is paying the most for your textbooks.”
If you’re not fastidious about resource consolidation, the potential is that you’ll end up paying for it for years after the fact. Some high-end sources put the expenses at $200,000+ for a BA at top-tier institutions. So be smart, cut costs, and live cheaply.