Rent a Planted Tree (or) College Help

As you know, I usually try to write about subjects most of my readers can relate to, or at least understand on some basic level, as they consider my highfalutin histrionics, my enigma of experience, and my profundity of complete poppycock. However, today, I diverge.

Today I speak as the mother of a young adult bound for college. I speak as one who has taken a 2x4 to the pre-frontal cortex in the area of college textbooks. I am speechless about how much they cost. I'm sure you didn't notice. Let me go on.

I have decided to forego the current book I'm writing and write a textbook instead. It will be about something completely insipid and basically irrelevant to the human race and will be a requirement for a college class. This will drive the cost up exorbitantly and I will publish it myself. I will charge $300 per book. Very shortly, I will be living large and inviting you all to come visit me at my beach home in the Cayman Islands. But until that time we need these:

Now, I am NOT ungrateful that our dear Bo has received a college scholarship. This includes her tuition for four years, housing, parking, and office privileges. So what are you whining about, you might opine? Whatever I can find, I might say. In fact, do say.

We are Suburban Survivalists. We have existed on one income for sixteen years so I could be with the kids and homeschool them. It was our choice. I have zero regrets. But it did not leave us at the front of the line for financial resources. I looked both my children in the eye in sixth grade and said, "You will go to college. Here's how: scholarship. Get busy." Obviously, nothing is a sure thing and I am open to God trimming our sails for a different direction. But if all things are equal, and they never are, then that was and is the plan. However, I seemed to forget about that little part not covered: Textbooks.

Apparently, I fell into a deep slumber about this financial blow until three days ago when I woke up screaming, "We've got to order all your textbooks!" Bo started shopping online and hunting for every deal. And boy, did we get deals. We took our costs down from about $800 to $325.00. That's worth telling SOMEbody about. Maybe you. Most of us probably aren't living the high-life right now with the economy and if you can save a little bread, you just might have some to eat. So here's what we did: we bought as few books as we could and we rented the rest.

You're probably all brilliant and already know this can be done but we didn't. It's PERFECT. You use the books for four months and ship them back. Do ANY of us EVER look at old college textbooks we got stuck with because they changed editions and the bookstore wouldn't buy them back? They become paperweights, dust collectors, and thrift shop donations. And here's a huge bonus: one of the companies, Chegg, plants a tree for every book you rent. We are tree LOVERS so this was a big, green yahoo from us.

So here are your links if you're looking for less expensive options than the college bookstore.

To buy, check out:

Half.Com at www.half.ebay.com/

TextbooksRUs at http://www.textbooksrus.com/

We have used both these companies with good results when Bo took college classes in high school.

Others are:

http://www.textbooks.com/

http://www.campusbooks.com/

http://www.campusbookrentals.com/

But for RENTING, you can't beat Chegg at www.chegg.com/ and remember, they plant a tree for each book rented. You probably need to know that their prices go up as the start of school draws closer so you don't want to wait. We waited one day and the price went up $3.00 per book. We placed the order last Friday.

Happy shopping to you or someone you know who might need this info.

Copyright 2009