What Square Mobile Payments Means for Students

This thing plugs into your phone, and charges credit cards. What a world we live in.

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Stop me if you've heard this before. You pay $20 to cover the pizza order for your friends. None of them have cash on them, or at least nothing smaller than a $20, so they promise to get you back. The money never comes.

College is full of moments like this. Whether it's splitting a bill, getting paid back for booze or cover at a dorm party, or buying and selling old DVD's and dorm furniture. If you're anything like me though, you hardly ever have cash on hand, and most of your friends don't either. Luckily, the days of unpaid debts are over thanks to Square.

If you haven't heard about it, Square is a mobile payment startup founded by some of the same people who brought you Twitter, and it's incredible. Simply sign up for a free account, and they'll mail you a free (!) credit card reader tha plugs into the headphone jack of your iPhone, iPad, or Android device. Once you have everything you need, simply type in what you want to charge your friend on the app, and have them swipe their credit or debit card. They even get a receipt!

Of course, there are some drawbacks. You will pay a 2.75% processing fee on all transactions, so you'll either need to eat that cost yourself or build it in to the charge, which runs the risk of pissing off your friend. In my experience the reader often takes a few swipes to work properly, but that's not really a dealbreaker. If you're concerned at all about privacy though, it's been reported that the reader can be hacked to act as a credit card skimmer, but if you're the one actually accepting the payments you won't need to worry.

Overall, the benefits far outweigh the drawbacks. I personally hope these things become as ubiquitous as cellphones, as I hate feeling like a bum when I don't have cash, probably more than I hate being saddled with a full bill by my cashless friends. This is a fantastic, free system that most college students could use on a weekly basis, and there's no good reason to delay signing up.

Smart Money Moves for College Students

Money. College students never seem to have enough of it. Photo courtesy of superstrikertwo. Licensed under CC BY-2.0.

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Possibly one of the most common things I hear around campus is, "That sounds like fun, but I'm totally broke." College students are notoriously broke, and sometimes even take pride in how we can get around stuff by spending the bare minimum. It's almost like a game. Regardless, we are always looking for ways to save money so we can spend it on more awesome things (read: alcohol). Here are a few quick tips that will help keep more money in your wallet and also will help you become more financially savvy.

Make a Budget

I know, you're already way too busy to add another thing to your to do list. But the reality is that if you just spend an hour or two every month figuring out how you are going to spend and save your money, you might actually figure out a way to save more money. For instance, if you say, "Okay, I'm only going to spend such and such money on eating out this month," then you've set yourself a goal. Once you reach that point, you know you shouldn't spend anymore money on eating out. If you didn't make that plan, you might be spending more money than you realize on certain things.

In addition to saving you money, planning a budger is a great tool that you'll have to do when you get older and get out of college. It's a skill that you should practice while you're still in college and have a little bit more leeway.

Build Up Your Credit

Building up your credit may not necessarily help you save money right now, but it is definitely something you should be doing now as a college student. You'll need credit for loans after college for a car, graduate school, or someday even a house. One of the easiest ways to build up your credit is to get a credit card and pay off your balance every month. Of course, actually getting a credit card as a college student can be difficult. HerCampus wrote an extremely thorough article of what it takes to apply for a credit card and which kind of card you should be looking for. You can read their article here.

There are other ways you can build up your credit. You can take a small loan out from your bank for something like your books, and then pay the loan back quickly with money you already have saved up. For more tips on how to build up your credit without using a credit card, check out this article.

Stop Spending Unnecessary Money

Well, duh. That just seems like a stupid suggestion. However, if you look closely at your spending habits, you might notice that you spend quite a bit on some items that are completely unnecessary. Some of the biggest money wasters, according to CNNMoney, are things like

• ATM Fees - You can easily look up an ATM of your bank that won't charge you that annoying $2 extra fee for using their machine
• Bottled Water - This is my biggest pet peeve. Getting a filtered pitcher for twenty bucks will save you hundreds of dollars a year, not to mention it helps save the environment. It's really a no brainer.
• Brand Name Groceries - I'll admit, I totally spend that extra one or two bucks for brand foods that I know that I love, like my favorite flash-frozen green beans or that specific brand of meatballs. But for the things that don't really matter, there is no shame in buying a generic brand that will end up saving you quite a bit once you get to the check out counter and all of your groceries tally up
• Eating Out - It will almost always cost more per meal to eat out than it will to cook for yourself. Avoid eating out. It's healthier for you and you save money

Cut these unnecessary spending habits out of your life, and you'll be using that money for better purposes. 

What money tips do you have for other college students? Let us know in the comments!

[via Free From Broke, HerCampus, and CNNMoney]

Broke? Hungry? Five Tips for Lowering Grocery Costs

Batch cooking is even more fun with wine. Image courtesy of Flickr user m0les. Licensed under CC BY-SA.

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If you're away from the comforting arms of a dorm meal plan, it can be hard to figure out how to eat cheaply and healthily. I learned this last week, when my diet of frozen meals managed to net me a $70 grocery bill--and that's without any meat or dairy. By changing what I was bought, I managed to supply myself with a week's worth of groceries for $40.

Follow all of the old rules: These are nothing groundbreaking, but they bear repeating--batch cooking and careful meal planning (to avoid food spoilage) will save you time and money. If you've never shopped or cooked for yourself before, familiarize yourself with how a good grocery list is assembled. Don't just go to the store and buy what looks interesting--unite your meals with common ingredients, like Laura did with chicken this summer.

Autopilot your meals: Particularly breakfast. For example, I heat up a frozen biscuit every morning. They're $5 for a bag of 20. (Check the frozen food aisles.) They don't go bad, have a low unit cost, and make it so that I don't have to buy breakfast more than once or twice a month. If you can manage to remove one meal a day from your weekly grocery haul, it saves you buckets compared to buying several boxes of cereal or cooking a different egg dish every morning.

Use budget-conscious cooking sites: Are you a math nerd? Are you broke? Then you will enjoy Budget Bytes as much as I do. The author provides PDF ingredient lists and breaks down the per-recipe and per-serving cost of each of her meals. One recipe usually provides enough food for a week's worth of dinners. Also good is Big Girls, Small Kitchen, which is targeted at 20-somethings with a limited amount of kitchen space and number of food-prep gadgets. The college-specific cooking site Collegiate Cook also wins points for photography that suggests that the food was prepared in a real human kitchen, not on a Food Network sound stage. Any site targeted at people in our age range is likely to have lower per-meal costs than something intended for middle aged people.

Limit processed foods: I have a sociology professor that likes to yell at students to "avoid the middle aisles." That's where processed food lives--it can be stuck in middle aisles because it's designed not to need to be refrigerated. In addition to being bad for you, processed foods are often much more expensive than their non-packaged counterparts. I realize that individual, microwaveable packs of edamame are cool and all, but you're in college: you quite likely have a bunch of free time and no money, so go ahead and buy a large bag of frozen or fresh edamame and siphon out individual portions yourself.

Avoid supermarkets: I'm lucky enough to live near Your DeKalb Farmer's Market, which is a truly delightful store that caters in large part to Atlanta's immigrant communities--they have all the injera a girl could dream of. The prices are much, much lower than at Kroger or Publix, and the quality is better. If you can find the part of town with the largest immigrant population, you're likely to find cheaper groceries--the Asian markets and Indo Pak groceries near Emory both have better prices than the nearby grocery stores. If you can find someone who grew up near your college, they'll likely know what part of town you should be looking in. Farmer's markets are also a good bet, but they tend to be early in the morning on weekends, so they can be inconvenient if you were out the night before.

Got your own tips for saving cash on groceries? Let us know in the comments!

How to Build the Ultimate Beer Pong Table: Part 3

We're almost done building the Ultimate Beer Pong Table, all that’s left is to apply the varnish. Just to recap, in Part 1 we assembled our beer pong table from a sheet of plywood and set of folding table legs. In Part 2, we designed a stencil and used it to paint a design onto our beer pong table.

Today’s portion of the build is arguably the most important part, by applying a protective coat to our tables, we protect it against the elements. Without varnish, any beer spilt on our tables runs the risk of ruining the paint job or the wood for that matter. From an aesthetics point of view, varnish gives our tables a glossy look and a smooth feel.

Let’s finish our tables.

Click to read more ...

Meet HackCollege's New Class of Writers

As a 100% student-written site, HackCollege sees writers graduate every year, and we have to restock our talent pool with a new class of bloggers. We've brought in two great ones this year from opposite ends of the U.S., so be on the lookout for their posts!

Deryck Wong

Deryck is a senior at UC Berkely majoring in Business Administration and Economics. He loves video games and Apple products, but he has plenty of experience with pretty much any platform under the sun. Deryck has been holding down the weekends for us with his OS Tips and App of the Week features, and he'll often chime in during the week too with some of his favorite life hacks. Feel free to get in touch with him at deryck@hackcollege.com

Sarah Feng

Sarah is a sophomore at NYU who keeps herself busy with a double major in Journalism and Economics, a minor in Computer Science, and a position on the school paper. She also dabbles in piano, figure skating, and app testing on her MacBook Pro, and she started for us last week with a few great back to school posts. You can reach her at sarah@hackcollege.com, or follow her on Twitter or Tumblr.

Guest Posting

Of course, you don't need to be a staff writer to get published on HackCollege. If you're interested in getting a guest post published and bolstering your writing portfolio, check out our guest posting guidelines and send in your best work!

Wiggio - A Collaboration Suite: Review

Wiggio your way into effective collaboration. Photo used courtesy of fair use from Wiggio homepage.Need a laptop? Our Back to School series is brought to you this year by Intel. We've teamed up to bring you the HackCollege Laptop Chooser. If you share the Laptop Chooser, you'll be entered to win a Samsung Series 9 Notebook!

College is a social experiment in itself. Being involved in student organizations is sometimes more demanding than a job in college. But since enterprise software like Exchange isn't marketed towards college students and student organizations, there needs to be a new contender for collaborative software. Enter Wiggio.

I started using Wiggio this past semester to help organize a student government cabinet I was an assistant director in. I didn't come up with the idea, but my chairperson did and I've not looked back since. Wiggio offers collaboration that is more professional than just Facebook, and allows for more features than a normal social networking.

Wiggio has Google Calendar integration, which similar systems like Google Apps offer, but not with the separate interface of a site like Wiggio. Group leaders can organize conference calls and have an amount of disk space for each account to uploaded necessary files.

Leaders can also poll their users and start virtual meetings and conference calls - my favorite feature. All over the state during summer break? Just find WiFi and go to your meeting.

Wiggio combines the best of worlds - disk space like Dropbox, conference calls like Skype, calendars like Google, and networking like Facebook - in one simple, free, collaboration suite.

Doing Creative Work Outside of Campus with Ien Chi

Last week, I sat down in my dorm room to interview fellow Emory student (and director of the award-winning film "Tick Tock") Ien Chi. As referenced in the interview, this is take two--the original was lost in the ether of poor wifi.

In the interview, we talk about how to succeed in whatever you're passionate about when your school may not have any official support for it. In Ien's case, he's an award-winning director at a school with no film program. We cover funding, social networking, and how to get involved with whatever you're passionate about in your city, off-campus.

Ien's website is here, and you can check out his YouTube channel here. If you have any questions for him, comment here or email him at the address he gives in the video--ien.chi96@gmail.com.

AP-Google Offers $20,000 Scholarship for Digital Journalism Students

If you're a digital journalist student, you can win a $20,000 scholarship. Photo courtesy of Flickr user vancouverfilmschool. Licensed under CC BY-2.0.Digital journalism is a fast growing field that is overtaking traditional journalism more and more. It incorporates new types of media that presents news to the public in new ways. As this field expands, the Associated Press and Google are offering a $20,000 scholarship for digital journalism students to help them in their education.

According to their website, "The AP-Google Journalism and Technology Scholarship program is offering scholarships for the 2012-2013 academic year to six promising undergraduate or graduate students pursuing or planning to pursue degrees at the intersection of journalism, computer science and new media. The program is targeted to individual students creating innovative projects that further the ideals of digital journalism. A key goal is to promote geographic, gender and ethnic diversity, with an empahsis on rural and urban areas."

Applications can be found here. The program is open to college sophomores or higher. Applicants must submit a project or concept that explains how his or her strategy moves digital journalism forward. Recipents will be chosen in Spring 2012.

For more information about the scholarship program and to read more from the creators of the program, read their press release here.

[via Engadget]