The back to school season is upon us, and many newly graduated high school students will head off to college for the first time.  More than ever, college students feel financial pressure.  The cost of college tuition continues to rise, and a student is often forced to decide to go into student loan debt to pay for her education or to work many hours to try to pay for the tuition without going into debt.

As a former college teacher I have a few thoughts on the subject.  If a student is going to college full-time, I cannot stress enough that school should be the main focus.  If a student needs to work, he should work part-time, 10 to 20 hours a week.  Yes, there are plenty of college graduates who brag that they worked full-time and went to school full-time and did just fine.   Yet, what were their grades?

I routinely had students in my class who worked full-time and went to school full-time.  In this scenario, education almost always gets shortchanged.  A student cannot neglect their employment, or they will be fired.  Instead they neglect their school work and get low grades, often not even passing grades.  A good rule of thumb is that for every hour in a credit course, plan to study three hours outside the class for a liberal arts class and four hours for a science or math class.  That means a student taking a 3 credit hour rhetoric course should plan on spending 9 hours outside the classroom doing homework.  If the student is taking a 4 hour anatomy class, he should plan on spending 16 hours outside the classroom on homework.  A full load of classes can range anywhere from 12 to 18 credit hours.  Those hours represent the time spent in the classroom.  Even if all the classes are liberal arts classes, the student should still be putting in 36 to 54 hours on homework a week to obtain optimal grades.  Unless the student doesn’t plan on sleeping, working a full-time job is too much.

There is nothing wrong with reversing the situation and working full-time to avoid taking on student loan debt.  However, the student should only commit to taking a maximum of 2 classes a semester to obtain optimal grades.

College students should accept that they can’t do it all.  Either go to school full-time and work part-time and accept that you will have to pay off debt when you graduate or work full-time and go to school part-time and accept that you will graduate debt free, but it will take longer.  If a student takes on too much and earns low or failing grades, they have ultimately just wasted their time AND money.

photo credit: ralph and jenny

Today is the 2nd of November.  If you live in the U.S., that means it’s also election day!  You should get out there and place your vote.  (note: you should also be educated to some degree as to who you want to vote for.)

It’s a civic duty to vote.  And everyone should do it.  But, if you don’t know what your voting on or who your voting for, you should either figure that out or just stay home.  The last thing you want to do is place an uneducated vote and accidentally vote for something or someone you don’t believe in.

Go!  Rock the Vote!

Maybe it’s just because of the impending spring-like weather.  But, it seems like I’ve seen a large number of fitness related posts on many of the personal finance sites that I read.  Which made me pose the question.  Do fitness and frugality go together?

I think the answer is yes.  By it’s very definition, frugality is the rationing of resources and the careful spending or resources.  In being frugal, we carefully budget our money.  We carefully check over the fliers and find the best deal on groceries.  Eventually, as we continue doing these things, they become second nature.  We do them almost without consciously knowing that we are.  It becomes a way of life.

Fitness is very much the same.  In being fit, we ration our resources; eating only what our body needs.  We keep close track of how we are spending our resources and are constantly trying to find ways to improve our outcomes.  We want to run a faster mile.  Do more sit-ups, pull-ups, and bench press more.

So, it’s only natural I suppose that the two attract each other.  If you’re spending your time being frugal (and like it), there’s a pretty good chance you might either be fit, or should give it a try.

I just noticed that the 2 year anniversary of Beating Broke is coming up in a few months.  My how the time flies!

I’d like to celebrate in some way.  What does everybody think?  What should we do to celebrate?  Maybe a nice pizza party?  I know who we could get to deliver.  Or maybe we just have a nice quiet dinner?  Or?

Let the suggestions begin!  I want to hear your ideas and how you’ve celebrated your anniversaries on your sites.

I’m a little disappointed in Dave Ramsey’s “big announcement”.  Not because I don’t think it will be an excellent event, I do.  But because I won’t be able to attend any of the locations that will be hosting the event and there isn’t currently a way to watch the event online or after the fact.  I’ve had a little birdie tell me that it might be available on the Fox Business network that night, but that doesn’t help me either.  If you’re streaming an event of this magnitude to over 5000 event locations, what’s another live feed on the website for those of us that live too far from any hosting sites?

The event itself should be quite amazing.  I just wish I could attend.  If you want to check to see if there is a location near you that will be hosting the event, you can click on the attend button on townhallforhope.com and do a quick search.  It really should be something to see.

After the awesome discount that Intuit was running last week, they’ve decided to run a very similar one this week.  The details:

40% off QuickBooks Pro – all versions (both CDs and Downloads)and QuickBooks Mac (both CDs and Downloads) + Free Learning CD + Free Shipping

The only difference with this one over the last is the substitution of a free learning CD instead of the one year of support. I’ve never used either, so I can’t vouch for which would be more valuable. And it’s kind of a moot point now anyways, as the one with support has expired. This current one runs from February 23rd 2009 to February 27th 2009.

Go out and get your copy of Quickbooks Pro today!

If you’ve been holding off on getting yourself a copy of Quickbooks Pro, this special is the one you’ve been waiting for!

40% off QuickBooks Pro – all versions (both CDs and Downloads) and QuickBooks Mac (both CDs and Downloads) + Free Shipping + 1 Month Free Support

The offer is good from February 16th 2009 through February 20th 2009. You don’t need to be a math genius to know that 40% off of Quickbooks is a huge discount. If you do anything with business accounting, Quickbooks is the standard in business accounting. It’s a little bit heavy for personal use and for that I would suggest something like Quicken or MS Money. I personally use Quickbooks pro (albeit the 2008 version) for my small business accounting. It does an incredible job keeping all my income & expenses in order and has some very useful reporting features.
You can see all the new features and order at the Intuit Quickbooks 2009 page.

WaMu (formerly Washington Mutual) has announced that their interest rate on their Online Savings has been changed from 3.30% to 3.75%.  This is the second announced interest rate for a online savings in the last several weeks, so it is hopefully the beginning of a new trend.

Currently, I believe, the only way to use the WaMu online savings is in conjuction with one of their free online checking accounts.  I haven’t personally used either account, so I can’t vouch for ease of use or quality of service, but the 3.75% rate certainly puts them near the top of the list of high-yield interest accounts.