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Paying for College

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College just started this week and with the usual classes come books. Only this time around I did not take out a student loan. I just took one of my checks for contracted work and cashed it, then went down to the book store and bought the books I failed to get online. Which I meant to get more online, but I waited to long and Amazon showed a two month wait on some of the books. (Which on Amazon one book was about $130, at the college bookstore it was $220.) During this whole mess I have also been thinking about my plan past my Associates degree. Here are the options I believe that I have:

  • Continue on to a Bachelor’s degree full-time
  • Focus all my energy on building my business after graduation
  • Do the Bachelor’s degree, but take it one/two classes at a time

The reason for the two different Bachelor degree option is the cost. The university I would transfer to requires me take 42 credit hours. Currently they charge 410 per credit hour, which rings up to be 17,220. Which if I am a full-time student then the state lottery based scholarship would cover almost $4000 of that amount. Leaving me with over $13,000 to come up with. Which if I’m not able to get other financial aid leads me to option two…

Taking two classes (2460 – 562.50 = 1897.50) per semester. Which the 562.50 is the pro-rated scholarship and will be with me for six semesters. This will in the long run cost me about $13,800. But the almost $1900 is better to manage then the $3795 I would need to come up with for three of the semesters. Or I could take three classes two of those semesters and be even on the cost.

But while I’m doing all this I will be working in and on my business, to grow it. Which leads to the last option. Taking all my time and the $13,000 I would need and devoting it all to my business. Investing in better equipment and nicer ads. And in some ways it is almost tempting just to choose that option. But I do have to take into account why I’m getting a degree if I’m running my own business. That is for a backup, should something happen to my business with a Bachelor’s degree I feel like it’s safer and it allows me to advertise that with my business.

Lucky I still have till fall of 2013 to be deciding, I may end up choosing one of these options or none of these options. I still got a lot of learning and saving to do in these months to come.

Moving Forward

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I’m sure that several of you may have wondered when I would start posting articles again. The answer is this week. As you know from my last post I needed to take time off and during this time I have learned several lessons.

One of the very first things I learned is you can never have a big enough emergency fund. When this event happened my parents was able to pay in full for the funeral. They wasn’t limited by money. This helped enormously. I cannot imagine having to sacrifice during a time like that.

I also learned that you need to keep your family close. When this happened we had our yard full of people and  it was one of the larger funerals in the town. It made it a lot easier to have people with whom you can rely on.

Third, I learned that an understanding boss is a blessing. If I had been working somewhere else, there is no guarantee that I could have missed so much work as I did. To top it off one of my contracting clients even paid me a partial bit since they understood I still had expenses.

Which brings me to another thing, you shouldn’t over do eating out. By the end of it I felt physically sick from all the fast food and junk I have been eating. I normally packed my lunch and eating out as much as I did or having people bring fast food to us only made me physically worst.

On Friday I plan to publish a rough time line of topics for the next coming week. With summer session right around the corner along with the 2nd quarter being half over with these next few weeks will only fly.

Missing posts and hard moments

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I originally planed to post three times a week and I haven’t since last Monday due to a death in my family. I do hope to post more articles soon. During this time I have learned a few lessons and have learned that you never want to be limited by money. I had to take almost a week off of work yet my expenses spiked since I ate out more often in addition to filling up sooner then I would have liked to. On top of it I have finals next week and still have to finish projects from earlier in the month. I do hope you the reader understand. I want to publish good articles and not just something I thrown together in five minutes, which at this time I just decided to take a break from it all and I plan on starting back within a week.

Thanks,
Zack