So I’ve been completing net price calculators for all the schools I’ve applied to and they all include an estimated cost for books & supplies and other expenses (personal, transportation, etc.) The cost seems pretty high for these expenses (one school estimated I’d spend $4,720 on books, supplies, and other expenses). I plan on renting most of my books, I’ll be in state so I won’t need much money for travel, and I’m a pretty frugal person so I won’t spend anymore that $400 on dorm and personal supplies. Plus I have a ton of left over school supplies from past years that I can use. From your experience, were the estimated amount for books, supplies, and other expenses accurate? Did you end up spend more or less for these expenses?
No, schools just give an estimate of those.
What you need to pay to the school is tuition, fees and room and board (if living on campus).
@mommdc Okay, thanks for the response!
You only need to pay tuition, fees, room, and board directly to the school.
Buying used textbooks and reselling them costs about 1/4 to 1/3 as much as buying new, so that’s still much cheaper than renting which is usually 50-75% of the new cost.
@goldenbear2020 Oh, I did not know that. I always just figured it was cheaper to rent books.
Some schools underestimate those numbers and others overestimate them. Travel obviously depends on where you’re coming from, and personal expenses are dependent on how frugal (or not) you are. As for books, my daughter was way under the estimate some semesters, and went a bit over in others. Sometimes there is a brand new edition and no inexpensive rental available, sometimes there are expensive codes required, other times a friend would give her a book or sell it for a pittance, or the prof would let them use older editions which were practically free - book expenses really varied in our experience.
Yes some of these schools really overestimate other. You can probably figure out a decent budget for the supplies you will need–toiletries, occasional fun with friends, meals your dining plan won’t cover, etc but textbooks can vary wildly like others have explained. Neither of my kids are really into clothes but we’ve found that they will both need some different things for college like rain jacket since there will be a lot more walking, if you change climates from home may need warmer or cooler clothes, etc so we have planned on a larger than normal amount of clothing budget to cover this.