7 Money making moves for parents to cover back-to-school shopping expenses

With back-to-school season approaching, it’s time to think about making some extra money so that you can easily cover the cost without ruining your finances. Chances are, you haven’t thought about how to increase your cash-flow for buying school clothes and supplies till now. Still, it isn’t too late. You can make some last-minute money making moves to fund your kid’s back-to-school cost easily.

1. Take advantage of FAFSA: No matter what your financial condition is, FAFSA allows you to obtain need-based, low-cost, federal student loans from private colleges. You can apply for FAFSA online as it is quick and easy. If you don’t have a college degree, then fill in the dot only for ‘high school’ option. This might help your kid to get extra aid.
2. Write articles:Plenty of websites are there that pay you for writing articles. All you need to do is create an account in those websites, give relevant information and start writing articles based on the various categories they have. You’ll get paid for each article. Just make sure you read the ‘terms and conditions’ carefully to know what kind of articles these websites are looking for. Don’t write spammy articles as they will be rejected.
3. You can write articles even for parenting websites such as Babble. You can write articles on parenting with a twist. Try to make your article unique by giving a fresh piece of advice. New parents can learn a lot from these articles.
4. Become a tutor: You can give tuitions to high school students on the subjects you’re good at. You can ask your kids to make your services known to their friends in school and the community. This might help. You can also develop a simple wordpress website and list your services.
5. Request for a bigger paycheck: Obviously, your employer won’t give you a hike just because your children would go back-to-school. But, if you have worked very hard in the last 1 year, then you deserve a good hike on basis of your performance. So, have a talk with your employer regarding your pay hike and promotion. A bigger pay-check can help you cover the back-to-school cost easily.
   Tip: Please don’t cross your budget just because you have received a good pay hike. Buy only what is absolutely necessary. And, look for the ways to stick to back-to-school budget.
6. Search in Bing: Do you spend a lot of time online? If so, then use Bing search engine instead of Google. You can earn credits every time you make a search in Bing. You can cash in credits for gift cards from popular stores such as Amazon. Use these gift cards to do your back-to-school shopping.
7. Open a savings account: Some top banks are ready to pay you for opening a savings account. It doesn’t harm to have a second bank account since you can use it as your emergency fund. So, you can easily open multiple savings accounts in various banks. Just check out the names of the banks that are ready to give you a bonus for opening a bank account.

The maximum bonus you can get is $500, enough to cover your back-to-school shopping cost.

A word of wisdom

Sell your kids’ old school books through bookscouter.com. You can get highest price for the books by comparing prices with 58 book-buying websites. This would help you understand how much you can possibly get for your books. Once you find the right buyer, decide how you’d like to receive the payment. You can download a free shipping label and then send the books.

Also read - How you can get back-to-school without debt