My son started college this year at George Mason University, and while we have one less mouth at home to feed, the cost of college is unbelievably high. His grandparents paid for his tuition and his father and I paid for his room and board, but he is on his own for any other expenses, including textbooks.
Last week he called me to say that it was going to cost over $600 to buy the textbooks he needed for this semester or $400 to rent them - basically all the money that he saved from mowing lawns and weeding for neighbors over the summer.
I took it upon myself to find a cheaper alternative and this is what I discovered - a website that compares the cost of books for sale online, and ranks them from the lowest to highest prices, with the cost of shipping included! The website is www.booksprice.com
My son had emailed all of the ISBN's (International Standard Book Numbers) for his textbooks, so I plugged them in one by one and came up with a list.
I ended up ordering two books from Ebay and two from Half.com, (which is owned by Ebay), using the $150 in PayPal funds that I got from the Rite Aid gift card deal last week. I ordered another two books from Amazon, and paid with the Amazon credit that I bought with the Paypal Prepaid MasterCard from CVS last week. I also went through Swagbucks to order from Amazon, and got 3 SB's for every dollar spent!
The remaining six books came from four different sellers. I purchased four of them, and two are rentals until December 21, 2013.
My grand total came to $297.29 minus $6.95 from Rite Aid in UP Rewards and $15.05 from CVS in ECB, or $275.29. I earned over 300 Swagbucks, which is almost enough for a $5.00 Amazon gift card. Best of all, since my son will own ten of the books, he can hopefully resell them when the semester is over to help pay for his textbooks in the spring!
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