1.)Join the military
Joining the Army, Navy, Air Force, or Marines can help a lot when it comes to school debt. Not only can you attend school for free while you’re in the military, you can attend school for free when you leave the military and collect BAH (basic housing allowance) which can help you pay your apartment or you could stay with a relative, save your money, and put a down payment on a house.
For example, soldiers in San Francisco receive $4,200 a month in basic housing allowance. How do I know this? Because I was in the army for four years and I’m in college collecting BAH right now.
You can use this BAH calculator to find out how much money you can get in your area.
Make sure the year is correct, it goes off of the zip code of your school, and set the pay-grade to E-5 because that’s what you’ll be receiving.
2.) Scholarships and Grants
There is a helpful website by the name of myscholly.com which matches students with an enormous database of student loans and helps them keep more money in their pockets.
Next we have the Federal Pell Grant which you can read more about here.
If you’re about to attend college or you’re still in college and you haven’t filled out this form called FAFSA (Free Application for Federal Student Aid), you’ll be missing out on a lot of financial aid opportunities.
3.) Attend Community College
Steve Jobs, Tom Hanks, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Halle Berry all went to community college and had astounding careers for many years which means that you can too.
When it comes to colleges, in-state tuitions are what you want to pay if you want to save as much money as you can. Mark Cuban, the famous billionaire from Shark Tank, is known for attending Indiana University because it had the least expensive tuition out of the business schools that he wanted to attend.
Yes, you have to be a resident of that state to pay in-state tuition but when you compare your yearly tuition to out of state tuition’s, you’ll see what I mean. “On average, it cost $8,990 more for students to attend a college or university in a state where they are not a resident.”
Sources:
http://www.defensetravel.dod.mil/site/bahCalc.cfm
