Brevity style!

Giveaway – you entered yet?

Back to School posts from the College Money Network:

This Writer’s Wallet: Get an Internship & Make It Count
Broke Grad Student: Broke Student’s Guide to Free Software and Online Resources
MFA of Bust: Off-campus fun on the cheap
Here at PTY: Beginners Guide to Staying on Top of Student Loans
Green Panda Treehouse: Find Cheap Transportation for School and Work

All good articles! Read them!

Blog carnivals featuring PTY last week:

No Debt Plan: Carnival of Personal Finance #165: College Football Edition
Broke Grad Student: Carnival of Money Stories #72: Back to School Edition

It’s back to school time — do you know what your student loans are?

In all seriousness, this is my pet peeve: I have yet to come across a fellow college student who knew much about their student loans. How much have you borrowed? From who? At what interest rate? And the big Kahuna: how much will you owe when all is said and done at graduation?

It doesn’t have to be this way. Ignorance may seem like bliss, but you’re better off learning from my mistakes. Trust me: instead of bliss, ignorance means you get bit in the ass later. Staying on top of things is your real ticket to freedom.

Keep Papers In One Place

I know, I know — it seems like my solution for everything is a manila folder and an electronic folder. But it works! Hang onto all the papers relating to your loans. It may seem like a lot now, but you can weed it down and figure out what’s really important when you actually start repaying.

Keep a text document on your computer with all the information you can get about your loans. Who’s issuing the loan? Do you have a co-signer? How much are you borrowing per term? What’s the interest rate? Most importantly, most loans nowadays come with an online account you can log into — especially the federal loans. Keep all the information you need in order to log into that account. (Figure out how to encrypt this file — this is sensitive info!)

Run the Calculator

Now, and at the beginning of every semester/quarter/term from now on, you should run the Loan Calculator. Use the total loan balance you estimate you’ll have at graduation. There’s two big reasons for this:

1) Make sure you’re on track. The loan calculator tells you how much money you’ll need to make to pay off the loans you’re getting. If the number seems too high, you need to figure out a way to reduce your loans, stat.

2) A wake-up call. You’re in school. You’re paying to be there, whether you like it or not. You’ll have to pay this money back – not even bankruptcy can erase student loans! Not to scare you or anything. It’s just a way to keep the big picture in mind.

If You Don’t Know, Look It Up

Loan stuff all seems like gibberish. Subsidized? Unsubsidized? Perkins? Stafford? Graduated repayment? They don’t really lay it all out plainly for you, do they? Thankfully, you’re going to school in the information age. Don’t wallow in ignorance — put Google to work!

So what if you really don’t know what loans you have, and can’t find the info? You might be able to get a snapshot from the National Student Loan Data System. You’ll need to know your federal PIN, which is the number you use when you fill out the FAFSA every year. Also, check your college billing statements. If you still feel like you’re not getting the full picture, make an appointment with your school’s financial aid office.

This seems all pretty simple, doesn’t it? Keep track of your papers, know how to check your balances, and run the calculator once a term. But if you actually bother to do it, you’ll be ahead of just about everyone else with student loans. Because from what I’ve seen, most people just aren’t on top of the game. Peace of mind: If you’re on top of your loans, that means your loans aren’t on top of you!

The Back to School group writing project at the College Money Network is in full swing! You’ve entered the giveaway already, right? Well, good! Make sure you check out the great posts that have been written by the group so far:

Broke Grad Student kicked things off with 6 Cool Ways to Track Your Expenses Online
Green Panda Treehouse wants to help with Maximizing Your Financial Aid
This Writer’s Wallet offers up 5 Things Every College Freshman Needs to Know
Spilling Buckets tells you How To Save a Bunch of Money Buying College Textbooks
and here at Poorer Than You, you got the tools to Make This the Year for Scholarships.

Stay tuned! We’ve got another week of back to school posts for you!

Blog Carnivals that featured PTY this past week:
Festival of Frugality #137 at Frugal Homemaker Plus
Carnival of Personal Finance: City Slickers Edition at Squawkfox

Welcome to a new year of classes! Whether you’re a newbie freshman, on your last year of the Van Wilder plan, or even if you’re still in high school, it’s time to saddle up and make this year count. And by “count” I mean “profitable!”

Scholarships are one of the easiest ways to make a lot of money in life. People are always looking for the next big “get rich quick” scheme – but in truth, the easiest way to get your hands on $10,000 is to fill out a form, attach your transcript, and send it away.

But we all know it doesn’t exactly work like that. You’ve got to get your scholarship application to the top of the pile. So, uh, how do you do that?

Grades

I’m only gonna touch on this for a tiny moment, because you already know it. The higher your Grade Point Average, the more scholarships you qualify for. So even raising your GPA by a tenth of a point can open doors. End of story.

Scholarship Attack Gear

Get a manila folder and a cheap flash drive. Yep, cheap – it doesn’t have to hold very much, just a few Word documents and some PDFs. Every time you fill out a scholarship application, keep a copy of it in one of these places – preferably both!

Why? Because scholarship applications and essays, well… they get a bit repetitive. And for most of them, you can use previously written essays! So you can just grab something you’ve already written, edit it a bit, and send it on its way. I mean, how many times do you want to write the “I see my ideal career as…” essay? Once.

Get a calendar. It’s better if you use a calendar that you use for other things too, or else you’ll forget to look at it! Write down deadlines. But not real deadlines, use fake ones. Make up a deadline at least a week or two before the scholarship is due.

Why fake deadlines? Because if a scholarship has a lot of qualified applicants, the committee will have to start looking for any little thing to whittle down the pile. “Submitted too close to the deadline” could be the reason your application gets tossed out.

If a scholarship application has lots of parts, break it up into mini deadlines. I once had a scholarship that asked me for everything under the sun: a ton of financial information, two letters of recommendation, four essays… there’s no way you can leave that stuff till the last minute. Start with the letters of recommendation. First of all, you want to make sure you get anything that relies on other people done first – you can’t count on other people to be slaves to your deadline. Secondly, once people have written those letters for you, you’ll feel more pressure to actually finish the application.

Make It a Class Act

Take your weekly class schedule. Find some time in it, maybe a break between classes, that’s at least two hours long. Write in a new class: Scholarship Class. Go to the same place in the library every week, with your manila folder and your flash drive, and spend two hours researching, writing essays, and gathering other stuff you need.

Try not to use your own computer for this if you have a laptop. Using a library computer or one in a lab will limit distractions, and it will make you want to get stuff done so that you can get back to your own stuff.

Some weeks, there will be so many scholarships coming up, that you’ll have to give yourself homework for this class. (March tends to be the time of year when that happens.) So give yourself homework (essays, asking for letters of recommendation, getting transcripts) and give yourself a consequence for not doing the homework on time.

If you have trouble being your own professor of Scholarship Class, find a friend who can take the class with you, without being distracting. Then play professor to each other – ask for updates, assign homework, keep track of each other’s deadlines as well as your own. But again, find someone committed who won’t distract you or skip class!

Letters of Recommendation

Treat every interaction with professors, bosses, and advisors (even club advisors!) as a building block toward a letter of recommendation. I’m not advocating sucking up. And sure, there’s always going to be a few professors/bosses/advisors that you don’t get along with, and are never going to give you a letter of recommendation. But things can change over time, and you should do your best to sparkle when you can. Treat everyone with respect, and make deadlines. If you can’t make a deadline, let them know days ahead of time. It all counts.

Don’t Use the Shotgun Approach… Yet

The Shotgun Approach: Applying for every scholarship under the sun, regardless of your qualifications. If you start out this way, you’ll burn out pretty quickly, and you probably won’t get any of them. Start slow. Pick a few that really match you, that you have a really good shot at getting. Carefully craft the applications and send them off early.

When your manila folder is bursting at the seams and your flash drive is filling up, when you can finish an application in 10 minutes flat, when the registrar knows to have transcripts ready for you before you even show up… start shotgunning it!

The blagonet can be a dizzying jungle of information — how are you ever to find your way to great blogs about money written by college students and twenty-somethings?

Have no fear! Now the College Money Network is here! This mighty band of heroes is made up of the following debt-fighters and wealth builders:

Broke-Ass Student [RSS]
… where my idea of splurging is feeding my cat Fancy Feast

Broke Grad Student [RSS]
Adventures in paying back $20,000 in student loans

Green Panda Treehouse [RSS]

MFA or Bust [RSS]
Fine Arts ≠ Money

Poorer Than You [RSS]
Talking about money, without being boring.

This Writer’s Wallet [RSS]
the story of an Chicago 20-something as she tries to make, save and spend money

And, well, me too, of course. Together, we… well, we write about money and college! What did you except? Saving the city from supervillains like Dr. Horrible? Please, we leave that to the professionals.

But you can expect some group writing projects, maybe some giveaways, and most importantly, some sweet money talk from all the participants. Links to the other blogs in the network are now in the sidebar, so check them out from time to time!

(Why yes, I do have Dr. Horrible on the brain today — you know how much I love free internet television and Joss Whedon! Plus, this world is a mess and I just… need to rule it.)