All Posts Tagged With: "Campus Money"
Can crowd funding pay your tuition bill?
Two Canadian entrepreneurs plan to try
From a Greenlight promotional video
Crowd funding websites, notably Kickstarter and Indiegogo, are used to raise cash for everything from charitable causes to music projects. Recently, more than 60,000 fans of Veronica Mars used Kickstarter to raise nearly $5 million to produce a movie based on the TV show. It was an impressive use of the concept, which involves small amounts of money from many donors.
Such successes raise an interesting question: Can crowd funding be used to pay for university or college? The founders of two Canadian startups—Greenlight and FundUni—believe so.
FundUni, based in St. John’s, Nfld. is the creation of Kyle Hickey and his brother Trevor, who both attended Memorial University. Though in its infancy, FundUni aims to help both current and prospective students launch tuition funding campaigns. It will work like this: participating students will post a video detailing their stories and ambitions. “The more compelling the better,” says Hickey. Students can offer rewards to those who contribute to their tuition funds. For instance, Hickey, 28, says an art school student could offer a painting or art lessons in exchange for much-needed financial support. The brothers are seeking an initial crop of five students to test the concept. They hope to promote the site across Canada within a year.
Infographic: They work hard for their money
How Canadian university students are paying their bills
The typical Canadian university student spends four years blowing borrowed money on clothes, music and liquor, right? That may be the stereotype, but it’s not the reality. The Canadian University Survey Consortium’s 2012 study of more than 15,000 graduating students shows that six in 10 are working, the vast majority pay off their credit card bills each month and only one-third have more than $20,000 in debt. Here’s an infographic that shows how students are paying their bills.
Five money rules every student should know
What I learned from Princess host Gail Vaz-Oxlade
Slice.ca
After years of watching her TV shows Til Debt Do Us Part and Princess, I got the chance to listen in person to Gail Vaz-Oxlade discuss her Money Rules earlier this week on campus. Moneyaftergraduation.com and the University of Alberta’s Student Financial Aide Office hosted the free event. After an hour and a half, I felt less afraid of the sometimes ruthless world of money. I’d like to share five rules that stood out for me.
Rule 1: “Don’t pay the bullsh*t.”
By “bullsh*t,” Vaz-Oxlade means your monthly minimum credit card payments. Every credit card owner should pay more than the minimum. Those seemingly low payments required each month are meant to keep you in credit card debt for as long as possible, so you pay more interest overall. Oh, and the same go for student loans. “Aggressively pay down your debt”, says Vaz-Oxlade. She says students in debt should only worry about savings after they’ve paid off their loans.
Rule 2: Take on no more than one year of your future net income in student debt.
Vaz-Oxlade says this is a well-known rule of thumb, but I’d never heard it. Apparently every student should try to graduate with less student debt than their projected net income in their desired job. So if your career starts out paying $30,000-a-year after taxes, you shouldn’t have more student debt than that. (Law students, for example, can borrow more because they will make more.) Otherwise it eats up too much of your income, “and you won’t have a life for a very long time.”
