This blog post was written by my younger sister, Laura. She is a junior in college, and she works very hard to make her dollars stretch. Check out what she has to say about investigating an option to rent books through Campusbookrentals.com. Oh how I wish this had been around 10 years ago when I was in college!

Every turn you make, it seems that people today are trying to find more and more ways to pinch every penny and stretch every dollar. Being a college student, if I have a penny to pinch to begin with, I’m doing great! Student loans, gas money, food money, and a wedding to plan are all tugging at my financial strings right now, and hello…it’s expensive!

One thing that tends to always sneak up on me towards the beginning of every semester is buying my text books. You’d think I’d remember that I’m going to have to fork over around $400 every semester just for textbooks alone, but it seems to always catch me off guard, and there I am, wondering how in the world I’m going to get the materials I need. $400 doesn’t exactly come easy around here! The process of buying books on campus is stressful aside from financial reasons as well. I can’t tell you how many lines I’ve stood in waiting for a text book so I can be a lucky one and get a used copy. I also can’t tell you how many times I’ve been forced to buy a BRAND new text book because I wasn’t the lucky one in line to get a used copy. So annoying!

Last semester my university started to offer the option to rent your textbooks. Basically, you pay a slightly reduced price off of what you would pay for a used copy of the text book, and you must return the book in excellent condition within a set amount of days from renting. You do not get any money back for the text book when you return it. I sort of looked into this option. I didn’t look very hard at it, because the rent price was still too high, and I figured It would make more sense to just buy a used copy (fingers crossed) and then sell it to a friend for close to the same price I paid for it. Overall, I figured it would be cheaper for me to just buy. However, a lot of my classmates took advantage of renting their textbooks and seemed to be pleased with their results because they felt like renting was their cheapest option. Whatever floats your boat, right?

But it seems that there is an even better option! I recently heard about an online textbook rental company called campusbookrentals.com. I thought It wouldn’t hurt to go online and check out some of their prices and see if they might make renting textbooks a more feasible option for me. Before I checked out the prices at campusbookrentals.com, I stopped at my university book store to price some of the books I will be buying for the Fall semester. Let me begin by saying that renting from this company is DEFINITELY something I will be doing. I’d be silly not to! I’ll let these figures speak for themselves: