Search online for scholarships

Frequent Frugal Follies readers know that I have a fourteen-year-old daughter.  She's completing ninth grade next month, which means that college is getting closer and closer.  And with that comes the worries about how to pay for it.

We saved a lot of money when she was first born, which was invested in a 529 mutual fund during the late 1990s tech stock boom.  And it did really well... until the recession in the early 2000s.  We continued to add money, which was good, since we bought a lot of shares at low prices.  The prices rebounded and the value of our investment grew.... until the current economic downturn, which the fund is just starting to recover from.

So we have a good amount of money saved, but it's not enough to cover four years of tuition, room, and board for a state university, and certainly not anywhere enough for a private school.  So guess what her part-time job will be this summer?

She'll be looking for scholarships on the Internet.  She'll be using scholarship websites to find scholarships that she can apply for now or that she can file away for a future year.  (Yes, you can get scholarships before your senior year of college.  You can even earn scholarships while in middle school, depending on the scholarship.)

It's just amazing what kinds of scholarships are out there.    There are scholarships for specific majors or school types, for specific ethnicities, or for people living in specific geographic locations.  For instance, I found a scholarship that is only open to students in Minnesota and Western Wisconsin.  My daughter doesn't qualify, but only a limited number of people would.  Which means the odds of winning this scholarship are pretty good if you do qualify!

You can also search by scholarship deadline.  That means you don't have to spend a lot of time looking through scholarships where the deadline has already passed, which makes the process a lot less frustrating and saves you a lot of effort.

Once she finds scholarships that she qualifies for, she'll spend more time this summer writing essays, filling out applications, or whatever she needs to do to apply.  She probably won't win most of the scholarships, but if she wins even one, her time spent on this project will be worth it.

(All opinions are 100% mine. Please see my disclosure policy for more information.)