Hello, frugal (read: cheap-ass and poor) college students! September, the month of the best laptop prices, is almost over. Buy it now if you’ll be needing one in the next year. Or you can pay attention for the particular laptop you want to become super cheap the week before the spankin’ new model hits the market.

If you’re a planner and would like to mark your calendar now for the next twelve months’ worth of strategic shopping, feel free to use the jelly-filled orbs in your sockets to scan WiseBread’s Buying Calendar. It’ll save you more money than those cinder-block shelves and eating all that ramen.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

Fall term is here. Students across the nation are moving from the simple and perfectly organized beginning of a fresh term into the messy, I-don’t-have-time-to-wipe-my-ass remainder of the term. Not too much panicking as of yet, but the perfection is fading fast. Before things get so out of control that you don’t have time to learn about and implement a better, faster system, read Dawn Foster’s post on how to Take Control of Your Inbox: 9 Ways to Sort Email.

1. Status Reports
2. High Volume Subjects
3. Twitter Messages
4. Services
5. People
6. Unimportant
7. Important People
8. Critical Notices
9. Projects and Topics

Posted by Alexa Harrington

(sorted)

Forbes has an article up on the 10 Things College Students Waste Money On. Tuition seems to be the least avoidable item on the list, but textbooks and school supplies are certainly full of frugal options.

1. Textbooks
2. Tuition
3. Automobiles
4. Housing
5. School Supplies
6. Food
7. Socializing
8. Applying for Credit

Also included: excellent advice on how fresh-faced college students can learn early on how to live below their means, which sets them up for a better financial life later on down the line.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

(fancy school supplies)

It’s April! For college students that means digging in a little deeper and trying to find a few more months’ worth of motivation to get through to summer break.

For high school seniors, April means making the biggest decisions of their College Admissions Odyssey: Which college to pick among the colleges that have chosen said seniors?

No pressure, but most people meet the friends and life partners they will keep throughout adulthood while they’re awash in higher education matriculation. Which is to say that your future relationships are kind of riding on which college you decide to attend. Again, no pressure.

Can’t breathe? Need an inhuman, analytical tool to help you decide while taking the pressure off of you? International Counselor pointed out this nifty and simple it’s-out-of-my-hands tool. Punch in the colleges you’re thinking yourself in circles about, answer some questions, and done. Go forth and make good choices, people.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

(mainframe)

It’s next year, which tends to trigger heaps of clean-slate thoughts and lots of getting-shit-done inspiration. For anyone wanting advice regarding career development/improvement, or maybe just a job, Lindsey Pollak has rounded up her Top 10 Job Hunting Tips of 2010.

Further Reading:

Job Search Advice For College Graduates

Posted by Alexa Harrington

(unemployed)

The Four-Year Crunch: How to Graduate On Time. It can’t be measured with existing technology exactly how much it sucks that this advice is useful and relevant. Adults, in case you teens and twenty-somethings haven’t yet come to this realization on your own, tend to screw s**t up on a daily basis. The four-year college degree is no exception.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

(number 4)

The recession makes the holidays even more exciting, yes? The stress and fear of minimal funds leads to killer adrenaline rushes, which is always fun. Adults are always freaking out about the gift-giving season because they have no idea how to chill the eff out and stop trying to constantly up the ante. College students have the advantage: You’ve been starving for lots and lots of semesters and know how to work the gently-used and regifted items into glorious gifts, all wrapped up in shiny paper (or the Sunday comics, to be more realistic).

I myself am a frugal little spaz who was creatively thrift-store shopping and regifting before it was all hip and trendy and green and s**t. Just so there’s no confusion.

A close family friend of mine recently retired (she was my Dad’s high school sweetheart and I’ve known her all my life). I purged the hell out of my Already Read stacks of books and gave her a huge, delicious collection of retirement leisure reading. She was happy, and told me she’d start in as soon as she gets back from Peru.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

(book-stack sculpture)

Recession bright side: Everyone is starving, not just the college students. (Maybe more of an equalizer, not a bright side.) Either way, cheap gifts from the heart come in handy this time of year, and everyone will be awed by your thriftiness. Jamie at Surviving College Life has several DIY gift ideas for all the ladies in your life. Try to save the crafting until after exams are over.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

Arjun Muralidharan, aka the Productive Student, has a list of 14 ways college students can strive for greenness on Earth. You’ll want to do them all to slow the destruction of the planet, but you’ll actually do them to save yourself some coinage.

14 Ways to Be a Greener Student (and Save Money Doing It):

-Eat less meat or go vegetarian
-Do more efficient laundry
-Buy groceries with less packaging
-Eat out less
-Buy a greener computer
-Optimize your commute
-Decompose organic waste
-Bring your own bag for shopping
-Recycle paper
-Buy recycled notepads and textbooks
-Put old and unwanted textbooks up for sale
-Use a durable water bottle
-Be conscious about lights everywhere
-Reduce and manage electronic devices

Posted by Alexa Harrington

(recycled notebooks)

I don’t care how high your SAT scores are: if you’re planning to attend any institution of higher education that isn’t blatantly obvious in its accreditation (Stanford, Yale, etc.), and you don’t take the so-easy-a-monkey-could-do-it step of checking your intended school’s official accreditation status, then you’re an idiot.

Go here or here and get it done. You’ll spend hours more time texting today than you will ascertaining that your institution will hand you a valid degree after you’ve given said school your blood, sweat, tears, time, and money. Avoid this woman’s mistake.

Accreditation Resources:

Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA)
U.S. Dept. of Edu. Database of Accredited Postsecondary Institutions and Programs

Posted by Alexa Harrington

(graduation joy)