In college, students will do just about anything for money. Many kids try online gambling, donate blood, or participate in medical studies with potentially harmful side effects. When kids are in need of money, they are willing to go to great lengths to make money (even if that means using morally questionable techniques. Here are two short stories about how I was able to abuse the system in order to stay frugal as a college kid.

6% = ??

When my roommates and I moved into our new apartment, we needed lots of new furniture. So we headed over to IKEA, where we found everything we were looking for. As we headed over to the checkout, we noticed a sign offering a coupon for your next purchase worth 3% of today’s purchases if we used a debit card. Plus, if we waited a week before redeeming it, that coupon would double. Not bad, but for the $300 worth of kitchen supplies, it came out to only $18. Worth taking a separate trip? Probably not.

But then we came up with our grand scheme. Why not buy $5,000 in merchandise, get the coupon (for $300!), return all the merchandise, and keep the coupon?! It was a perfect plan, so we went around the store looking for the most expensive item that we could fit in our cart. We found comforters for $300 each, piled them into our cart, and headed back over to checkout. The plan worked perfectly. We had no problem returning the comforters just seconds after purchasing them, and we had ourselves a nice little coupon.

The next week, we headed back over to IKEA to pick up our kitchen supplies, bought our $300 in merchandise using the coupon, and suddenly we had a kitchen full of beautiful pots and pans without costing us a penny. We were proud of our catch, but did we do the right thing?

Free BBQ Sauce

At our local supermarket, my roommate found barbeque sauce for a dollar. Each bottle came with a coupon for 35 cents off a bottle, plus a special offer doubling the coupon, plus a manufacturer’s coupon for a dollar back with the purchase of two bottles. He quickly realized that for two bottles, we would actually make 40 cents ($2-$0.7-$0.7-$1). He brought me back later in the day and we bought about 60 bottles of barbeque sauce, for free!

Better yet, we came out with $12 in coupons to use on our next purchase of anything in the store. Needless to say, lunch and dinner that day were free (actually as college kids, it was more like a week’s worth of pasta and sauce). Illegal? No. But did we abuse the system to get ourselves over $70 in free food? (If anyone needs any barbeque sauce, I’d be happy to give you some of ours.)

Since starting work, I’ve made a pledge to get what I deserve, but not take advantage of other people. I’d like to think that I’ve grown, but maybe now that I have a job, I won’t compromise my moral integrity in return for a few dollars. If I lost my job and was tight on cash, would I revert back to my “frugal” college ways?

I found out fairly recently that I’m an excellent negotiator. I’ve always had a knack for being able to talk to customer service representatives over the phone and get a better deal, but until a month ago, I would never have tried it in person. I thought it would be downright rude to enter someone’s place of business – where they were offering me a service – and tell them that what they were giving me wasn’t worth as much as they thought. I considered it disrespectful and couldn’t bring myself to do it.

Or maybe I was making an excuse for not being able to man up and get what I really wanted.

A lot of times we make silly excuses to put off getting something accomplished. I used to complain internally about the rain and use it as an excuse to stay on the couch instead of running outside. There are always going to be reasons NOT to do something. What we have to do is find one really good reason to go out and just do it. Sometimes it comes down to tricking ourselves, but one way or another, we have to take control of our lives instead of letting it pass us by.

When I run, I often get tired and shorten my goal, telling myself that I’m too tired or there’s a really good reason why I have to get home earlier than planned. I should know by now that last night’s tv show can wait another 20 minutes, but I always psyc myself out and tell myself I should stop. In the end, what works for me is telling myself that if I can’t push the extra half mile, I’m a wuss and will have no self-respect. A little harsh but that usually does the trick.

In terms of negotiating, I told myself that I was living a lower quality of life because of my embarassment and that negotiating face to face would ultimately make me a happier person. By taking a step and negotiating in the most unlikely places, I have been able to both save money and improve my quality of life. Going for it couldn’t have been a better choice.

What I did not realize, however, is how that one choice would affect my life in other ways. I now have more confidence to haggle in other venues, and that confidence has led to significant savings. I’ve even negotiated prices with ebay sellers by guaranteeing that if they’ll lower the buy-it-now price, I’ll buy it immediately and they’ll have the cash in their pocket in minutes.

I’m not sure which is greater, the money I save by overcoming my fears and pushing aside my excuses or the satisfaction and self-confidence I receive each time I’m able to save money on ordinary items.

In college, at the beginning of every semester, I told myself that I was going to stay on top of my reading. I was really excited to be responsible. The only problem was that the booklist hadn’t been released yet, so while I was able to tell myself I was going to do something, the reality was that I couldn’t really get anything done.

This used to happen a lot to me, whether it was in school, when planning to run (it was raining that day), or job searching (I’m going to get a good job by networking. But the career fair isn’t until next week). It’s very frustrating to want to get something accomplished when we are unable to. At the same time, by telling ourselves that we WILL start, that starting at a certain point we’re going to be better, we’re putting a stumbling block in front of ourselves.

Sometimes it’s hard to take action immediately, but there are always things we can do. We can ask friends what book was used last year, we can decide that running in the rain isn’t actually so terrible, and we can go find out which employers will be coming to the career fair and make a plan.

We love putting things off, and quite often, by doing this, we hurt ourselves. Still, there are almost always things we can do immediately to improve. Here is a list of 5 things we can do today to improve our financial lives:

1. Create a Budget – Create an account at Mint.com and find out where you can cut down expenses.
2. Adjust your Withholdings – Are you overpaying on your taxes when you could be
3. Open a Savings Account – I absolutely love my ING account, so sign up and set up an automatic savings plan to deposit a certain amount each month. Plus, email me and I’ll send you a link for $25 when you sign up!
4. Read! There are tons of great personal finance books out there than can help you make significant changes in your lives, and there’s nothing more important than getting educated.
5. Negotiate – Call your wireless carrier, your cable company, and your internet provider and ask for a discount for being a long-time customer. Or explain that you don’t think you will be able to continue service at the current rate, and they will most likely be willing to work with you.

There’s no reason to put off until tomorrow what you can do today. So get started changing your life right now!