Let me just say one thing, college is EXPENSIVE! Now, I’m sure you probably already knew that, but until you’re in college, it’s hard to understand how expensive, expensive is.
If you’re able to, scholarship and grants can be amazing because you don’t have to pay them back. However, you can’t guarantee that you’ll be able to cover all of your college expenses. This is when you’d probably need loans. Unfortunately, loans need to be paid back… and with interest! I have heard the horror stories where people have $100,000+ in students loans, and that can take what seems like forever to pay off.
Most people need to take out loans, which there is nothing wrong with that, but what if you could somehow not have any loans or just not much in loans? This is where the importance of saving before college comes in to play.
My main way to do this is to have a part time job during high school (can upgrade to a full time in the summer if you’d like). I started working early sophomore year and worked up until I left for college. Some points I even had 2 jobs at once! I will go into more details about what I did for work in high school in a later blog.
Another thing I did was I barely touched my paychecks. Of course, I need money to do things with friends, but I tried to limit myself. I knew I was going to need that money for college. Thankfully, my savings methods helped me get through college without having to take out any student loans.
