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When it comes to college expenses, after tuition and room and board your biggest expense is your textbooks. Everyone can relate to the experience of walking into the bookstore and staring in incredulity at the price tag on one of your required books. How could they charge that much for one book? Unfortunately, it’s not uncommon for some students to walk out of the college bookstore with a four figure receipt in their hands.
One such experience is likely to make you motivated to find alternatives to buying those expensive textbooks from the campus bookstore. There are a lot of solutions, but one of the best that we’ve found is BookBandit.
What is BookBandit?
BookBandit is an online service that buys, sell, rents, and delivers the books that you require to get the best education. They allow you to save money on your textbooks and they also make it easier to buy them. While you might otherwise have to search for hours in order to find the cheapest textbooks online, BookBandit allows you to get books at the right prices and with just one search – even when your books are coming from multiple shops.
After all, with all your required reading and your multiple part-time jobs, you don’t have the time to do all that searching! Which is why BookBandit is the perfect quick solutions to buying textbooks. They have over 20 partners including sites like Chegg, Barnes and Nobles, AbeBooks, Knetbooks and Textbooks.com.
Some of these sites allow you to rent books rather than buy them. The price for rentals is usually significantly less than you would pay if you bought the book. With rentals, you get the book in the mail and then ship it back at the end of the semester when you no longer need it. BookBandit even sends you a reminder e-mail when you have to ship it back.
Their site also shows you how much your saved so that you can keep track of how much further ahead you are then if you had bought your books from the bookstore. That means you’ll know just how much extra cash you’ll have to use to buy chips or hummus.
You can also sell your books through BookBandit. Selling your books back at the end of the semester is a great way to get back part of your money. You can use this money to buy books for the following semester or to make sure that you aren’t exclusively made of ramen.
How Using BookBandit Helps With Student Loans
If you’re using student loans to help you pay for college related expenses, you’re likely worried about the day when you have to start repaying those loans. It’s enough to cause you to wake up in a cold sweat! But there are ways to reduce the amount of debt you need to take out. By saving money on things like your textbooks, you ensure that you keep your expenses low and reduce your need to borrow money. By doing this, you ensure that when you graduate you’ll owe less in student loan debt.
This is critical since so many graduates end up with crippling amounts of private student debt and often struggle to repay their loans. Many end up having to put off important life milestones like getting married, moving out of your parents house, buying a car, having kids, or buying a home. The last thing you want is to have to stay in your childhood bedroom for another 10 years while you repay your student debt! No one wants to have to worry about their parents trying to enforce a curfew when they’re in their late 20s.
So, save yourself the stress of having enormous student loans by reducing how much you spend on textbooks. BookBandit just makes sense – especially since it takes just a few minutes to save hundreds of dollars. If you use BookBandit over four years, you could save thousands of dollars in textbooks. That will make a huge difference when your student loan repayment period kicks in!
Author: Jeff Gitlen
