Posted by: admin 
February 7, 2013When my daughter started college, it quickly became apparent that helping her buy school supplies wasn’t going to be affordable. Her supplies for school up until now had been the usual fare: notebooks, pens and pencils, binders, and other accessories. However, when she told me what she would need for her first semester as an art student, my head reeled at the cost. Not only would she need textbooks, but they also required her to have a laptop or tablet for online coursework, and she was also responsible to have all the art supplies they had listed. Since her financial aid only covered the cost of her tuition and board, we had to cover the rest, which was well over a thousand dollars.
Going online really cut corners when it came to the laptop. We went to site where you could custom-build your own unit so that we didn’t have to pay for any features she wouldn’t use. This brought the price to under a thousand dollars, and the company gave us $100 off just for choosing them. Neither of us had realized that even if you’re taking classes at the campus, many classes today include online submissions that students have to complete as part of the coursework.
To save money on my daughter’s art supplies, I turned to discount art Web sites, which proved to be a great money-saving idea. Many of the supplies that she needed—sketch pads, charcoals, paints, brushes, and other accessories—were much cheaper than they were at big-name hobby and art supply stores, and when we bought over fifty dollars’ worth of supplies, we got free shipping. All told, I saved nearly two hundred dollars by buying everything online, and along with the saving I got on the laptop, we even had enough left over to buy some cute decor for her dorm room. Shopping online for her college supplies was convenient, saved me money, and sent my daughter off to college with everything she needed to succeed.