Justin Benz

Tag: College

  • Everything Is A Hobby

    Everything Is A Hobby

    I’ve been analyzing how I spend my time for the last few days.

    As I write these words, I’ve undertaken a project that is very large: I’m building my own house from scratch with no assistance from a construction crew, just me, with a few friends and my wife lending a helping hand from time to time.

    If I wind back the clock 5 years, I was spending an immense amount of time on schoolwork in a degree program that I had interest in, electrical engineering.

    Wind back the clock 5 years from that, and I was spending an immense amount of time on schoolwork that I had no interest in.

    My point is, as I’ve gone from financially insecure to financially secure, I’ve also gradually moved from work and school relating to subjects that were of minimal interest to me, to ones that were exciting to me and that I’ve always had a basic curiosity about.

    From that viewpoint I’ve basically moved myself from doing things that were fun and or satisfying, but I had no intrinsic interest in, to things that were fun, satisfying, and I was also interested in. It was merely happenstance that the career path that that I chose also happens to be incredibly challenging, it also rewards those who choose it with higher than average career earnings.

    But honestly, we live in the United States of America, and there is so much cash floating around out there that basically any career path can experience a similar trajectory. Which brings me to the point of this post. Any pursuit that we choose as humans must satisfy an innate curiosity that we have (and some people are obviously more curious then others) and when it doesn’t, we will inevitably be dissatisfied with the way that we spend the vast majority of our time. The average person will probably struggle to locate more than 60-70 hours of “free time” per week. If 40 of that is spent at work, what are the chances that you can really satisfy that desire to pursue hobbies and interests in the remaining 25 hours? Perhaps you can, but I think your chances would be significantly better if your career would also provide at least some satiation to your interests.

    Here is where people get lost; your career cannot be 100% pursuing your hobby. Every person I’ve ever discussed work/career/life with has always expressed a few things that they wish their job didn’t require them to do. I’ve even had the conversation with people who made their art into a career, (think pottery studio owner) and these people complain about the administrative tasks that are draining for them. You must analyze what your deepest curiosities are about, and then pursue a career that begins to help you satisfy those curiosities.

    It is human nature to be dissatisfied with the career that you’ve chosen, but if it is assisting you in your pursuit of a hobby, it becomes a much easier choice to stay with a company or a career path.

    Granted, I do have a certain advantage over many people because both myself and my wife know how to live within our means, and that has set me up to pursue school as an adult without crushing student loan debt. But this path is open to far more people then might initially consider it, since the beauty of student loans is that if you carefully choose a higher paying career that aligns with your interests you can use your earnings AFTER the degree program to pay for current expenses.

    The moral of the post is that when you have the financial security to do so, making the move to a job that satisfies an innate curiosity of yours can be a very satisfying and engaging life choice, and will definitely increase your satisfaction with your career path.

    If you are this far through my blog post, I already know something about you… you care more than the average person about what you end up doing with the majority of your time. Make your job have elements of your hobbies, and you will not dread the morning commute to work.

    I hope this post gives you some food for thought. Here are a few steps to get you heading in the right direction:

    1. Never give up, and don’t settle. If you are late in your career, or far into schooling for the wrong thing, and you aren’t sure you can make the switch, believe me, it is possible.
    2. Don’t expect everything about your job to be perfect. Even if you are in a good job, there will likely always be things that will bug you.
    3. No regrets. If you know you will get to the end of your life and regret what you are doing right now, stop doing that thing as quickly as possible. You are never as stuck as you think.
    4. Write down the things that you research and the things that interest you the most. This is an exercise that you can do in one sitting, or sit on it for a few weeks and write down thoughts as they come to you. One of the ways that I discovered my life path was that I spent a ton of time researching Nikola Tesla (a famous electrical engineer) my senior year of high school. I also read a TON popular science magazines as a kid. My curiosity was captured and it (eventually) directed my career path.
  • College on the Cheap: How to go to school for $1000 a semester

    College on the Cheap: How to go to school for $1000 a semester

    Listen, if you want to slip the colleges an extra $10,000 a year for your college experience, I’m fine with that. I’ve come to peace with the fact that not everyone can do what I did. But a quality education is still available to people at an affordable price if they know where to look. Anyone can graduate from college debt free if they want to. And that means you… yes, you! If you want the story version with all the juicy details, keep reading. If you just want the strategy I used, skip to the section with the headings.

    Here is how I went about getting not one, but two undergraduate degrees for what many people spend on their first year (or even first semester!) of undergrad, and how you can do the same. Some of these tricks I used from the very beginning, and some I learned several years in.

    There are 5 schools in my college experience, I’ll start with the most recent first:

    I attended a state school in Alaska. The average cost of attendance was $4400 a semester, which is far below average, even for a state school. On average I paid less than $2200 a semester. The difference was made up by scholarships. My overall cost could have been far less, but I didn’t decide to attend school my first year until after the deadline for scholarships had passed. In other words, 56% of what I spent at the University of Alaska was during my first 12 months there.  Total cost for 4 years of full time school? $17,600

    I averaged $1000 dollars a semester for 3/4 of this undergraduate degree. How? Part of it is luck; I received in-state tuition at one of the cheapest state schools in the USA. The other part of it was hard work. I spent time on local scholarships, and they drastically reduced my overall school cost. In fact, I treated scholarship applications as a type of part time work. During the time when most scholarships had their deadline, I worked non-stop on them. Probably averaging 5 hours per scholarship application. At this point I already had a bachelor’s degree in education and this worked to my advantage as I filled out scholarships. I spent far less time than some people on scholarships, and I turned out high quality (judging by my success rate) applications.

    I went to two different schools where the tuition was free. Yes, free. They were Christian schools and their goal, aside from education, was to prevent their students from graduating with debt. That didn’t stop one of them from charging ~$1000 a semester in fees, but who am I to complain? This is probably of limited usefulness to most you, since not everyone wants to go to a Moody Bible Institute. But it was great for me, and I walked away at the end of 4 years with an accredited undergraduate degree in education (Counseling to be precise).

    After starting at this school, I learned about another school that would accept my credits toward an accredited bachelor’s degree. That sounded like a miracle to me, since I had no idea that accrediting agencies existed just a few months earlier, and hadn’t thought to check my school before I began. So began my process of transferring credits from one school to another. I’ve now attended 5 different schools. I promise that I hated school when I left highschool. There was nothing that sounded more boring. Learning grows on you though.

    The strategies that I employed:

    FASFA (Free Application for Federal Student Aid)

    If you haven’t applied for this, you are throwing away money. Every single person who goes to school needs to apply for the Fasfa. Try to apply about 9 months before your classes start. At one school I went to I received a “Pell grant” for 110% of my tuition costs. This covered my tuition and all of my books, and I had some spending money left over. I can’t emphasize how important this is, especially if your parents are low income (student aid awards consider the income of your parents, as well as your own, until you turn 24, when it becomes dependent on your income alone).

    This is the website where you’ll need to go to fill out the forms:

    https://studentaid.gov/h/apply-for-aid

    Rent Share

    If you can, find some people that you respect to rent with. This could go really well, or it could be really hard. Even under the best circumstances, I’ve never lived with a group of people without having some high stress moments, but it has always been worth it. You will get to know people very well when you live with them, so make sure they are worth your time before you move in with them. I lived on campus, or off campus in a house with others up until I moved in with my wife.

    Part time work

    I highly recommend part time work to most people, unless they are shooting for a 4.0 GPA or have some other good reason to not work. I highly recommend looking for a part time job during your freshman and sophomore years in school that will allow you to work on homework while on the clock. Once you are a junior or senior, you hopefully be able to find a position that will build skills for your career. During each of my 4 year degrees, I graduated with more money in the bank than I started with. In order to do this, I worked full time in the summers doing what I knew how to do, construction. Use whatever skillset you have to make money. If you have no skills you can always be a waiter, busboy, coffee shop barista, valet, janitor or window washer.

    Loans

    Some people seem to have an allergic reaction to loans. They break out in hives at just the mention of that dreaded word. Maybe you are this type of person, you wake up clutching the sheets and shouting “24% APR COMPOUNDED DAILY, NOOOOOO!! Please read this paragraph with great care, because I’m going to tell you a secret that can change your life. Debt is only bad when it decreases your overall financial well-being. To illustrate this, take home ownership. Historically speaking, home ownership can be a great investment. If real estate prices rise at a greater pace on average then the current going interest on a mortgage, you may make money by being in debt! I bring this example up first, because the debt averse person is usually willing to make an exception for a house, simply because most people can’t afford a house without taking on debt. College “CAN” be far more advantageous then any mortgage, even with deep debt. Consider this: with 4 years of school, I literally doubled my earning potential. I have pay stubs to prove it. Even if I had to go into debt to do school (which I didn’t), it would have been a brilliant strategy. Say for the sake of argument that I needed to take out loans to finish that degree. The average student loan at graduation is $25,921. That means I could have paid my loan back in the first year after graduation, and still had an extra $10,000 to spare, not to mention a lifetime of increased earning above that. Do you understand why I think some loans are an acceptable risk? The risk is actually quite low for academically competent individuals who carefully research their desired career path and understand how the specific degree program and school that they’ve chosen will affect their work life & post graduation finances. If that isn’t you, then you need to do the research. If you are the type of person who isn’t capable of doing that sort of research, then maybe college isn’t for you.

    Textbooks

    I have an overactive conscience that won’t allow me to use any digital content that I don’t personally own, which eliminated the common strategy of finding textbooks online. What I did do was buy a previous version of the textbook, and often literally paid $200 less than my classmates for the book. Then I’d borrow someone’s book and copy down the questions that the professor required for that week, using my own book for everything else. I’d estimate this can save you from $150 to $800 per year on the cost of books. Libraries sometimes carry class textbooks, but you’ll have to email the professor early in order to find out what book the class uses, and check it out early from the library to be sure you get a copy (there are other cheap people out there too).

    Transportation

    If you don’t have to have a car, don’t have a car. Insurance, gas, and maintenance can really add up, especially if you can’t do maintenance yourself.

    Standardized Testing:

    Incidentally, I have never taken the SAT or the ACT. I started my college career at a non-accredited school which didn’t require any standardized test before entrance, and after that I was always a transfer student. But I have done my fair share of other standardized testing. Mostly college placement exams and CLEP tests. I did 17 CLEP credits. If I had been able to do more for my degree programs, I would have. They were so much easier then taking a class. The average time that I studied for my CLEP tests was about 8-10 hours. Less than many final projects, even for easy classes. I never failed a CLEP test, so I probably could have studied less. The one exception to this was Chemistry. I studied Chemistry for hours and hours. I never took Chemistry in highschool, so it was some kind of miracle that I was able to pass a CLEP test that covered two semesters of college level chemistry and lab. I highly recommend CLEP testing as an advantageous way to knock out some credits for (virtually) free. I think the tests were $80 each, including the proctoring fee. College credits are on average about $500, which means you could be saving thousands of dollars by taking CLEP tests. If you have interest in getting a college degree using CLEP tests or similar strategies check out www.degreeforum.net.

    Scholarships:

    I already mentioned it above, but spend time on scholarships. I don’t know how to emphasize this any more strongly. There are scholarships for people with good grades, but there are sometimes even ones specifically for people with bad grades. I recommend spending the most time on regional or local scholarships, then state scholarships, then national scholarships, as I never received funding from any national scholarships, but plenty of help from the others. Call the school you are attending, speak to their financial aid, and ask about scholarships that you can sign up for. They will steer you in the right direction. It is even worth setting up an appointment with someone who would know about scholarships if possible. Do this long in advance of the start of the school semester. My school had a cutoff in February for most scholarship applications for the following fall.

    Know How Hard Your Classes Will Be

    I highly recommend looking up every professor that you take using this website:

    http://www.ratemyprofessors.com/

    It gives you some idea of how difficult the professor will be. This allows you to plan much better for what classes to take in any given semester before the semester starts. This is only useful if other people have put a fair amount of reviews up. If you have a friend who is a year or two ahead of you in the program they will likely have a much better idea of what courses & professors will be difficult or easy.

    Technical Schools: “Tech School”

    These are public colleges that focus on non-four year degrees. They are cheaper, and usually require lighter homework requirements per credit hour. I knew people who couldn’t pass the physics or chemistry classes at the 4 year college, and they reported significantly easier classes at the tech school. They can also be a good strategy if you want to go to college, but haven’t decided on a major yet.

    American Opportunity Tax Credit

    I’ll just include a link so you can look it up yourself, but America subsidizes virtually every American college student with this tax credit.

    https://www.irs.gov/credits-deductions/individuals/aotc

    Transferring credits

    Transferring credits is hard. It is so time consuming to try to figure out what credits will apply where. You will likely spend HOURS trying to understand how your credits transfer from one school to another.Take the time. It is worth it. I remember spending literally days figuring out what credits would transfer to my next program in school.

    Honestly the credit transfer system for schools is broken. At some point you will need to see an academic advisor to see if your credits will transfer in. Very few schools will analyze your transfer credits unless you are an admitted student. If you are transferring credits, apply to the school and see what they say. If you don’t get the transfer credits you need, you are might lose out on your application fee, but that is better than having to retake entire classes because the school wouldn’t accept your transfer credit.

    Once I started school, each progressive school accepted transfer credits from the school before it. It is a bit of a hassle to transfer as they usually require you to provide all kinds of information about the course work from your prior school, but think about how much time (and money) you’ll save by not having to complete any additional coursework! Transferring credits is a great strategy and you shouldn’t be scared to do it!