How I Saved Over $30,000 While In College and What I Did with the Money

Instead of graduating college with a buttload of debt, I came out with about $30,000 in savings. This is a measly amount of money compared to the earnings of some people I know who started their own companies or got really good at online poker, but I thought it was a good chunk of money at the age of 21. This is how I did it and I hope it’s entertaining to you.

1. Went to a State Public College that My Parents Paid For — Yeah, I have really great parents, and the school I went to wasn’t very expensive six years ago. Even though our house was about three miles from campus they let me live on campus. The entire four years of education cost about $30,000 including tuition and dorms. That’s less than the cost of one year at most private schools. So the result is that I had no student loans.

2 . Got a Free Car from My Mom – Yeah, my parents are awesome. They’re not rich, though. The car was about five years old, and my mom bought it because her boss sold it to her at a very large discount. The boss had a Jaguar, and never drove his little Honda Accord, and so it was a very good deal. That’s why I never had a single car payment.

3. Never Got a Credit Card Until Senior Year of College — This may be a mistake in hindsight, because my credit history still isn’t very long. However, it may be a blessing too, because I ended up with no credit card debt.

4. Worked on Campus – I worked at a couple places on campus — one was an academic reader position, and another was a lab purchasing position. It’s pretty funny but the purchasing position paid about 30% more. Every other day, I would order radioactive embryos and chemicals for the plant biology department. That was a fun job because I got to look at what toys and weird stuff the professors were buying. The weirdest things I bought were cocaine, and two dozen live sterile cockroaches. The cocaine was bought with a license so it was legal. When the cockroach professor came in to pick up his cargo I asked him what he planned to do with them. He replied that he will have his students dissect them and determine the sex of the bugs. They were actually quite expensive, about $2.00 per head. I wonder who are the professional roach breeders out there. That’s got to be a pretty odd job.

5. Borrowed Textbooks from the Library – UC Berkeley has one of the best libraries in the country, and almost all the textbooks were there. I estimate I saved at least $1000 just by borrowing books from the library. It’s hilarious because I had a class with 200+ people, and there were 3 to 4 copies of the current edition of the textbook in the library, but noone borrowed the books except for me. What’s up with that? Maybe some people like keeping textbooks to remind them of the pain they went through, but I don’t. I just kept on renewing the books until the end of the semester and kept them in my locker. I guess not all college libraries have great collections, but most libraries will have at least one book you read during the long four years.

6. Sold Used Books on Amazon & eBay– This is one of those funny things that I just did out of the blue. I used to be a very big library book sale fan. I especially like their fire sales where bags of books were sold for $3 to $5. So the end result was that I ended up with a lot of books. I started listing them in Amazon Marketplace and some of them started to sell. It was pretty fun and easy to do and didn’t take that much time. The most profitable book I sold was purchased for $1 and sold for $97 on eBay. I actually learned a lot of things about running a “business”, but I quit this venture after college mostly because I got bored of it and didn’t have time and space for it anymore. The total net profit from selling a few hundred books was about $5000 to $6000. It was enough to cover rent for my senior year of college so my parents didn’t pay for it.

7. Had a Couple Internships and a Contract Job — These all happened in senior year. I didn’t really go to school the first semester of that year because I did a co-op, which is a paid internship that I received school credit for. That was sort of the first taste of having a real job and living on my own for me. It was a really good experience, and I think all college students should try to get an internship before graduating. The second internship happened sort of randomly during the second semester, and I got the job because of my experience in the first internship. That was much more part-time and lasted a shorter time period. The contract job was offered to me through a friend. So senior year all I did was work, and it was quite interesting. I had the opportunity to experience three extremely different working environments, and meet lots of cool people. Of course, I also managed to save most of my earnings from these gigs without debt and such.

8. Entered a Bunch of Sweepstakes – Sweepstaking is usually seen as a hobby for old people and stay at home moms. In fact, most of the women in the sweepstakes forums are stay at home moms. I learned a lot about advertising, spam, and sweepstakes laws when I had this hobby. I entered sweepstakes sponsored by reputable companies, and I won a lot of things. I’m still wearing clothes won from that hobby to this day, and my current favoritel Citizen Ecodrive watch is also a trophy from a win. I also won money and other random things. The coolest prize was a weekend getaway to Miami, Florida. I went there with my mom, and it was an awesome getaway because it was completely free. Sweepstakes is purely luck and the more you enter the more you will win. It is time consuming, and I gave it up when I graduated because I felt like I don’t really need to win small things by giving up my information anymore. Actually, there is still one sweepstakes I enter, and I may write about it in the near future.

Now you may ask, when did you study for class and do projects? Well, I spent a lot of time on those too, but college students really have a lot of time on their hands. That’s why a lot of them can start companies, get good at pokers, or becoming gaming champions.

So what did I do with my $30,000 after the pomp and circumstance? I put $7000 of it into a Roth IRA at Vanguard, and $13000 of it into an individual fund acount at Vanguard. I haven’t moved the Vanguard money for two years and the $20,000 there has now grown to about $27,500. I put half of the money in Vanguard Target Retirement 2045, and half of the money in Vanguard Primecap Core (a fund recommendation from my mom). I don’t worry about my Vanguard fund very much, and I’m just letting it grow. I put the other $10,000 in t-bills and i-bonds, which has been earning less interest. However, T-bills are very accessible and I like them because I don’t have to pay state taxes on the income. I think ultimately it really helped me to have very supportive parents who are also financially savvy. They told me about things like Roth IRAs and mutual funds and now after two years of working full time and saving, my little nest egg has grown to more than four times its original size.

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