Best Places to Save Money on Textbooks!
School can be one extremely expensive thing, so how can we fix one of the biggest expenses: books? Buy cheap. So, where do we find that out? Thankfully the people at LifeHacker.com did a little bit of work for us.
They made a collection of some very good places. You can view their post here. Though they forgot some important tibbits of information. Sure you can buy cheaper at those places, but what about other options?! How about being creative? Here are some real life past college experience tips.
Sphere: Related ContentQuick Fun Photoshop’ing lessons
Like many of you, photography and photoshop go hand in hand. But there is more to Photoshop than some simple photo editing. Photoshop can not only enchance photos, but turn them into complete works of art. Not to mention Photoshop also being a great tool for a plethora of other things such as web graphics, drawing, editing. Many many uses. But how to learn them all?
None of us have a bajillion hours to learn Photoshop, nor do we want to spend our life saving on study material. So here are a few quick links to help you out.
The first link is general google search:
This second link is a cool place to learn photoshop basics quickly and well:
How to Master Photoshop in Just One Week.
The last link for today is a cool tip on styling a photograph in Lomo Photography!
How to Make Digital Photos Look Like Lomo Photography
Sphere: Related ContentInterest Rates are still falling …
Believe it or not, but interest rates are still going down. Maybe not as drastically as before, but surely and slowly. What does this mean for us? A few things really; mostly good things and a few bad things.
A lower interest rate means we, as customers, can pay less! For example, in the mortgage world you can now get a brand new mortgage for 30 years at a fixed rate of 6.14% (6.14% as of this writing as show on Bankrate.com)! That really is amazing! For a $300,000 house your monthly payments are only $1,825.74. In the lending world, something like that was unheard of before.
Now we all know that the interest rates are down, so what else does it mean other than mortgages? Well, it also means that we won’t be getting as much on our CD’s, money markets accounts, and savings. It is how the banking world works … most things in banking are tied to the prime, so if the prime falls so does your interest earnings.
Do not fret though, there is a good thing out of all of this. Since the prime did fall, we can see falling payments on more than just mortgages! Assuming you can get yourself these better rates you will still be making a heafty yield spread on your money! Why? Simply because most of your debts are far greater than your savings, you end up paying so much less in interest on your debt that the reduction in your saving interest is inconsequential.
A good example of this is my student loans. When I got them they were for the going market rate for 7.25% and 8.4%. This got me rather high payments, but it was what it was. When the interest rates started to drop we managed to lock in a rate of 4.210% for all my loans! That’s just great!
Maybe the rates will go down a bit more before the pendulum swings back, but I wouldn’t tempt fate much more. If you’re payments are high, try consolidating debt. I would NOT recommend any debt consolidation place as most (not all) are scams. What would be good to try first is calling up the banks, loan institutions who gave you money and talk to them. Tell them that times are tough and see if you can work something out with them for lower payments.
In today’s market, most banks will be more than happy to lower your interest or payments to help you. Note though, they aren’t doing that to “help you”. They are just trying to NOT have another unwanted house on their hands (for example). So just go talk to them and see what you can do. Just like when you call your credit card company and ask for lower interest rates, you can do the same with loans.
Good luck!
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