As some of you may know, I am a homeschool mom. I homeschooled my daughter since the first grade, and my son has been home schooled since his very first day of kindergarten. It’s been a lot of hard work at times, but I’ve never regretted homeschooling; the rewards outnumber the drawbacks a million to one! Being able to experience my kids’ learning, growth, and development firsthand is something I would never give up.
And the years just flew by…
Last year my daughter finished high school and started taking college courses online. I was thrilled, of course, but when we were preparing for her first quarter, we ran up against an unexpected roadblock: textbooks.
Of course, you always hear about how expensive college textbooks can be, and I sort of remembered being outraged 20 years ago when hubs was in college, but I wasn’t really prepared for the sticker shock!. We were looking at more than two hundred dollars for books she would only be using for one quarter! What followed was tons of searching online for better options. We looked at used book sites, and those had a couple possible options, but many of the used textbooks were actually more expensive than new ones would be, and many of the textbooks weren’t available secondhand at all–new editions of textbooks often come out too regularly for the required edition to be available used.
So we looked into renting textbooks. This was where I let out a big sigh of relief. Renting textbooks cost only a fraction of what it would have cost to buy them new. We saved over 70% for her first quarter and close to that her second. Do you have anyone in your family that is in college? What did you do about textbook costs?
