Back-to-School Special: Top 7 Tips to Saving Money on School Supplies

As the summer winds down, every parent needs to do some back to school shopping. However, budgets have definitely tightened with the economic crisis and now, more than ever, you have to worry about every dollar you spend, even on school necessities. Here are some tips on how to save money while doing back-to-school shopping.

7. Buy in bulk

While 40 pencils might cost you $2, 10 might cost you $1. Obviously, you're constantly trying to get the most stuff for each dollar. Hence, common sense would tell us to buy the 40. On the other hand, some people just think about the dollar amount and get uneasy when spending more. But think about it. Do you really think that your child (that clumsy little kid) will be able to hold onto 1 pencil for even a week, let alone a whole month? And besides, even if you don't need all 40 pencils to get through the year, you've still got next year...

6. Look for coupons

You may be skeptical that Staples or Target will be giving out coupons but get your hopes up because perhaps these two particular stores aren't giving anything. But trust me, there will be at least one store that will and when you miss that $10 discount, you can't say I didn't tell you. Anyway, the best coupon site around has to be RetailMeNot, which is loaded with good deals and has an excellent interface.

5. Don't buy what they don't need

Sure, it'd be nice to have a customizable stamp maker or a label printer or a pack of blue staples but there's not need to splurge on school supplies. Just buy the basics; pencils, pens, erasers, a glue stick, a ruler, a calculator. They don't need white-out or tape to carry with them to school or an electronic dictionary. You know they'll barely use any of these items.

4. Get them to use their old stuff

Maybe their binder has a few scratches and has a bit of dirt on it but get your child to use old stuff again. Pencils that haven't run out of lead and erasers that are only half-used can still be packed into a bag for next year.

3. Don't waste

You have to teach them not to waste anything that they have. Staples can't be used to draw a picture and you can't use full bristol board as scrap paper. Have a scrap paper bin and a few old things that they can play around with.

2. Compare prices

This can be done quickly with Google Product Search. Just type in what you want and it'll return the most relevant results with prices and retailers conveniently included. Also, you can organize the items by price, then go to the cheapest retailer for each thing.

1. Don't worry about brands

Maybe they'll want the best clothes, but hopefully, your child won't care about the brand of his pencil. And you won't be cheated in quality either; most school supplies are around the same, whether generic or "luxury".

Can Google Answers 3 Compete with Yahoo! Answers?: Google TipJar

Yet another re-birth of Google's original futile fee-based attempt at getting into the knowledge market market, launched in April 2002. This initial site, dubbed Google Answers, has since shut down (December 2006) and was replaced by Google Questions and Answers. This version has made little to know progress since its beginning in June 2007 still posing no competition to Yahoo! Answers, which was actually launched three years after the launch of Google Answers. Questions and Answers is still available only in Russian and Chinese, although it is possible to access the actual websites, you just won't be able to use them (unless you're loyal enough to use a translator to translate every page on the site).
However, the long-awaited truly Yahoo! Answers-esque Google version of a knowledge market has arrived in the form of TipJar. This site is barely a few weeks old so it's hard to give constructive criticism that is really valid but right now, I must say, it is crap. If Google continues like this, they can forget about their ambitions of competing with Yahoo! in answers sites, let alone beating them.

Firstly, the entire website is extremely confusing to the point where you can almost sue them for criminal harassment. There are several different question views, links that take you to blank pages and links that serve to confuse you. Bunches of useless features also exist that include organizing specific users' tips by most popular and least popular as well as organizing your votes by most recent and least recent.
Also, there is no incentive for giving sharing tips or voting with no understandable points system, no ranking system, no levels and no profile customizability to show the outside world your expertise. This pretty much takes away the factor of addictiveness from the equation making TipJar a sure failure.
In addition to this, looking to capitalize on the economic downturn Google has created this site bearing only money-saving tips with no other aspects being covered. Nobody is going to check TipJar daily for money-saving tips. Plus, you can't really ask questions. You can share tips but you cannot ask questions. You're just basically stuck with seeing if you get lucky and find exactly what you're looking for in their database of roughly 5000 tips, not exactly the easiest task in the world.
And they must have really rushed to get this site up because the design is unbelievably poor. It's apparent that they made an effort the create a modern-looking site but failed miserably, creating a Yahoo!-like stuck-in-between-modern-and-oldies site. The icons suck, the logo sucks, the font choice sucks, the layout sucks and even the favicon sucks. And the lime-green color scheme is an utter eyesore that will turn you off immediately.
Further, the vote system that Google uses to decide which tips are good and which are bad is useless. If a money-saving tip is good, people know it's good and don't need green bars telling them what advice they should take.



And of course, who can forget the unbearably buggy system pops up a "[log] Google Moderator" page filled with random text every time you move to a different page on the site. Other smaller things that will begin to piss you off is the all lower-case alt text, screwed up mouseover reactions and the bottom toolbar that never moves from your screen.
Naturally, with all this, users are taking this service as an utter joke. In fact, some of the more popular tips include "Don't eat yellow snow", "Don't speed" and "Don't do drugs", which sure, are all good tips, for idiots.