Is retirement the last thing on your mind right now? Fair enough! With textbooks, professors, and homework assignments taking up all of your brain power, it’s hard to think about starting your career, let alone ending it! But hear me out:

Did you ever have a math teacher ask you which you would rather have, $100 now, or a penny that doubles every day for a month? Did you take the $100?

Silly you. If you’ve got a penny that grows at 100% interest (which is what doubling is) per day, you’ll have $5,368,709.12 at the end of the month. That is the awesome power of compound interest.

Of course, if you can find an investment that truly returns 100% per day for 30 days, I’ll hire you as my financial advisor and we’ll start building our Scrooge McDuck money bin! But even 8% or 10% growth per year can net you a sweet future, especially if you let the money sit around for say, 40 years. Try playing around with this retirement calculator, keeping in mind that the stock market (as a whole) generally returns between 8 and 10%.

So if you start investing $3,000 per year at age 18 as a freshman, you’ll have $1,358,700 at age 65. After inflation, that works out to $534,358 in spending power (in today’s dollars). Not bad for $250 per month! But what if you wait? Wait until you’ve graduated from school and had a few years to establish yourself?

To get that same $1,358,700, you have to contribute $5,245 per year if you wait until age 25 to start investing. That’s $437 per month, or nearly twice as much just for waiting seven years!

Are you ready to get this show on the road and see big returns on your money? If you’ve followed all of the previous college money tips, you are. Because you’ll have a reasonable level of student loan debt (or none!), no credit card debt, and you’ll already be saving for your short and medium term goals. Which means if you’ve still got money left over, it’s time to think long term and open a retirement account.

For a college student, a Roth IRA is the type of retirement account you want to get. To learn what you need to do, I recommend the Get Rich Slowly Guide to Roth IRAs. Written by J.D. Roth (no relation to “Roth IRA”) of Get Rich Slowly, it covers everything you need to know to get started. It’s a really easy read at only 31 pages, but it packs a lot of punch.

The ebook costs only $7 — the cost of a combo meal at a fast food place. And if spending that $7 gets you investing now instead of waiting until after graduation… well, you do the math.

Check out all of the College Money Tips!

If you’ll take a moment, please note that the title of this tip is “Rent Some Textbooks” not “Rent Your Textbooks” and especially not “Rent All Your Textbooks.” Here’s why: every time I write about renting textbooks, someone comes along and says “But Stephanie! I actually want to keep most of my textbooks! They’re for my major and they’ll be helpful in a later class, or after college!”

I know this. I still have several books from several classes in college, even though I walked the stage and got my diploma in May. I’ve got some film textbooks to help me make better movies, and I’ve got my personal finance textbook to refer to while writing this site. And I’ve got Randy Pauch’s The Last Lecture — yes, that was an assigned textbook for a class!

So yeah, there are some books you just shouldn’t rent, because you’ll want them later. But you’ll take some general education or liberal arts classes, too. And while those classes may indeed be interesting, you can usually tell from the name of the book whether or not it’s something you’ll want to keep past finals week. Chemistry in Context? While I admit this was one of the more interesting science textbooks I’ve read, I really didn’t need it when I was done. It was nice to be able to just send it back, rather than trying to sell it after finals.

Again, renting is not the best practice for every single textbook you need. It’s just for the ones you’re reasonably sure you won’t need after the class is over. And for those books, renting can save you a bundle.

I’ll give you some real-life examples. Because I’m a nut, I still have a worksheet lying around from when I bought textbooks last spring:

Fundamentals of Financial Management, Concise Edition (a book I totally knew I wouldn’t want after the class was over!)
Bookstore used: $95.50
Bookmaid: $40 – $85
Chegg rental: $46.42

Bookmaid is a website specifically for my school (RIT) which allows RIT students to buy and sell books to each other. So in this case, the best action for me to take was to buy one of the used copies being sold by another student through Bookmaid. Not only was it the cheapest price, but no shipping or shipping cost! So that was an easy choice.

Another example:

Internet Marketing and e-Commerce (probably not a book I would want after the class)
Bookstore used: $107.25
Amazon.com used: $84 (with shipping)
Chegg rental: $51.61

In this case, I went with Chegg. I could have gone with the Amazon.com used price, which would have been a savings compared to the bookstore, and tried to sell the book on Bookmaid when I was done. But the next offering of that class wasn’t until spring of the next year. I didn’t want to wait a year and then try to sell the book! Chegg was the clear choice for me here.

There are other books on the worksheet, but they all demonstrate the same principle: there’s no end-all-be-all-perfect place to get all of your textbooks. Yes, you can simplify the process by getting all of your textbooks from one place but that’s going to cost you. In the case of the bookstore, it’s going to cost you a lot.

If renting some of your textbooks sounds like a good deal to you, I highly recommend Chegg. There are other textbook rental websites, but Chegg is the only one I can honestly recommend, because it’s the only one I’ve used. But having used Chegg for two years out of my college career (for some of my books), I can say that I’ve been thoroughly pleased with their prices, their customer service, and their speed in getting books to me.

And they plant a tree for every book you rent, which I think is pretty awesome. If you decide to go with Chegg, use the coupon code press09 when you check out. It’ll give you 10% off of any rental order. (Expires 12/31/2009)