Tips from a college student

If you open a Zecco trading account now through my link you will recieve a free book titled 'China Shakes the World'. With Zecco you receive $0 Stock trades for up to 10 each month. I opened a Zecco account 2 weeks ago and am very pleased so far. It is great that the prices are free for regular trades, and if you go over 1o or do options trades they are only $4.50 each, which is still a great deal!

If you are new to stock trading, Zecco has a community forum where members answer questions, and after reviewing it I found it to be very informative and helpful. If you have been wanting to try stock trading but have never signed up, now is the time. You can purchase just one stock if you like through Zecco, just to get the feel of it. I am starting out slow, but eventually will probably trade more.

If you sign up through my link, you get the free book and I get $50. I just wanted to put that out in the open. So don't wait, sign up now!

-------------------------------------------------------
Don't forget to bookmark this site and sign up for the RSS feed so you can stay up-to-date on new posts!

Many of my classes require a subscription to a magazine or journal. For this semester I have to have the Wall Street Journal and Fortune magazine. I have found that I can access these through the school library online for free, or go into the library and flip through them whenever I want. This is an easy way to save some money!

Some of my large lecture hall classes have notebooks required to fill out. Since these are classes that almost everyone has to take, I started asking around and am going to try to get them for free or significantly cheaper. There are 2 upsides to this: 1) save money, 2) already filled out notes make class easier.

I still haven't purchased any books, except for one for my web class that I absolutely had to have to pass the class. I got an international version of that book, so it was much cheaper, and I am sharing it with another guy so it saves money.

By following these tactics, you can easily save 50-100 dollars a semester on books and required reading.

I hope everyone has a great, inexpensive semester!

-------------------------------------------------------
Don't forget to bookmark this site and sign up for the RSS feed so you can stay up-to-date on new posts!

As I mentioned in a previous post, I had to stay at school for part of Christmas break because of work. I was not able to stay in my dorm because they were doing maintenance on it, so I had to find another place to stay. I used this as an experiment to see how cheap I could live for a week.

*Note: This was only a week. It would not be possible to maintain this lifestyle permanently*

I was able to get 3 offers from people for me to stay at their house for free. This was big, because if it weren't for them I would have been paying big bucks for a hotel. So I got housing for free.

I figured out how to eat for free or cheap every meal. The way I got food for free was to a) get someone else to take me out, b) get someone to invite me over for dinner, c) get free food at work.
I got food for really cheap at sheetz and McDonald's. You can get a double cheeseburger and a 32 oz Sweet Tea for $2 + tax at McDonald's. Sheetz, just eat off the cheap menu posted above the screen. You can also eat for cheap by buying stuff like frozen fish sticks at Walmart or Sams and then cooking them later. I drink all water, so I didn't have to pay for that (except when I get tea at McDonalds).

Since I didn't have anything else to do, I picked up extra shifts at work and made even more money, thus easily clearing as much if not more as I usually make during school without living on dining hall food and dorms.

The main thing I learned through all of this is that the most important thing is who you know. By knowing lots of people and letting them know my problem, I get free housing and several free meals. I also have friends in high places that I use to pull strings sometimes when I need something.

When you have a friend helping you out, make sure you don't take advantage of them. If you take advantage of your friends, you won't have many friends. If they scratch your back, make sure you scratch their's later, in other words, always help out a friend in need and when you need something you will be taken care of.

-------------------------------------------------------
Don't forget to bookmark this site and sign up for the RSS feed so you can stay up-to-date on new posts!

I've been looking for a while for Christmas music, because listening to the same Cd's over and over gets old fast. And I hate the radio because I don't get good reception with my stereo. I had been using Itunes and listening to shared music on my college network, which is a good option, but I now have found my favorite solution: free XM radio on AIM.

If you are logged into AIM then you can look at the bottom of your buddy list and see the headphones button. If you click that you have access to a lot of radio stations, I know some of them are XM, I'm not sure if they all are or not. These stations are commercial free and good quality, much better than over the air radio.

What I have done is hook my computer into my stereo through the front input on my stereo and a cord I bought at Radioshack out the headphones jack on my computer. With this setup I can hear whatever is coming out of my computer speakers through my surround sound system.

I liked listening to the shared network on my Itunes, but that is only available on campus, it takes a long time to load, and Itunes seems to slow down my computer. I normally have AIM running in the background anyway, so this doesn't hog any more system resources. I also don't have to download the music, so it saves me a lot of hard drive space.

I don't know how long AIM has had this feature, but I'd be willing to bet that not many people use it. It is a good service though, as it is free XM radio. So if you are looking for some holiday music or any other kind of music, give it a shot and see what you think. If you don't have AIM, you can go to aim.com and download it. I don't know many people who don't have it though.

Have fun listening to your music!

-------------------------------------------------------
Don't forget to bookmark this site and sign up for the RSS feed so you can stay up-to-date on new posts!