Jul
29
How to Pay for College
Filed Under Advice | Leave a Comment
College is possibly one of the most challenging things in your life to pay for, right up there with your wedding, your first car, and the down payment on your first house. It can be especially difficult if you don’t have much help, and are having to work full time while you’re in school in order to pay for it.
However, there are ways to make paying for college easier. Here are a few tips.
- Ask for help. If you know certain family members are likely to give a generous monetary gift on graduation, suggest that they give the gift now instead, to help you pay for tuition. I know the graduation gifts are nice, but sometimes it’s better to have the money now and make paying for school easier on you. Plus, they’ll probably still get you something small for graduation, such as a nice university diploma frame.
- Take advantage of the education tax deductions on your taxes. Any tuition that you paid yourself (i.e., wasn’t reimbursed by your employer) is deductible on your taxes. Take full advantage of every tax credit that applies to you can help you save some money on your income taxes.
- Get help in gift form. Anytime family or anyone else gives you money to help pay for school, be sure to ask for it in a lump sum as a monetary gift. You can get a certain amount of money from each person as a gift each year without having to declare it as income — in 2009 this limit is $12,000 from each person. If you get the money as a gift and then pay for college yourself, you will still be able to take advantage of the education tax deduction when you file your taxes.
- Apply for all scholarships and grants you think you might have a chance at getting. There are many scholarships and grants that go unclaimed every year, so be sure to apply for everything you can find that seems suited for you.
Paying for college is still difficult no matter how many of these types of tricks you employ, but you can at least make it much easier by doing some of these things!
Jul
28
As parents, I think that we all want our children to succeed in life. We try to prepare them for lives as adults as best as we can and no matter how old they are, you are willing to help them no matter what.
So, when my son asked for help to pay for real estate investment training courses I knew that I had to help him. He had been working really hard to save up a down payment on his first investment property and truth be told, he was making a good return from it. But his problem at the moment was that he didn’t know how to get more money for subsequent investments except by saving it himself which was going to take too long. He thought the course would help.
There was a college in town that offered real estate investment training as a night class, but he decided to get his money back after the first few classes because the instructor didn’t know what he was talking about. So, he looked online to find a course that would work better for him.
Now, just two weeks in the course, he is very exuberant about what he has been learning and how that he will be able to succeed financially with all of the information that he is learning. I think that I made the right choice by helping him out.
Jul
27
Survey Says
Filed Under Business | Leave a Comment
I work for a city manager’s office. It is the city manager’s job to make sure that city government runs like a well oiled machine. But one of the things that are also important is that the citizens in the city feel as if their government is doing a good job. And what better way to find out how people feel than by asking them? So that is what we set out to do. We took a survey and it was no small undertaking.
We didn’t want a small representative sample. We wanted to go big. Since we are on the top of the food chain here in city hall, we had the perfect resource. We used our utility billing system. Every household that gets a water bill got a survey. And the response was terrific.
We knew going into this that we would not be able to hand tally the results. We knew that we would need special equipment for this. But that kind of scanning equipment is expensive. So we actually did a scanner rental. So as the surveys came in we would just feed them into this scanner that looked a bit like a copy machine. And when all was said and done, it appears that overall the citizens are very happy with the city services that they are receiving.
Jul
17
With the current recession, I’ve heard a lot of reports of people combining households to save money. Grown adults are moving their families in with their parents, either to help them save money or to take care of their parents — or perhaps a little of both. College students and graduates who have just recently joined the work force are moving in with their parents or getting roommates to help them save money in a time when this has become more important than ever.
A communal household really can help you save a lot of money. Of course, if both the families who are moving in together have whole households full of stuff, then chancs are at least one of you will need to put some stuff into self storage. The cost of personal storage is pretty minimal, though, when you consider how much money you will save on rent and other expenses!
Just be sure, when you are combining households to save money, that you have a plan in place to ensure that you actually DO save money. It is easy to get carried away and spend the extra instead of saving it. But if you sit down and run the numbers ahead of time, and make plans to set a certain amount into a savings account every month, you will ensure that combining households (and dealing with what we all know is a real trial) won’t have been for nothing.