Holy moly! I completely forgot how much college textbooks cost. I was checking out some of the online courses I’ll be taking for my master’s and saw that one class has six books. Six! I priced them at the Mizzou bookstore at about $250. I hadn’t factored in that extra expense. Maybe I should’ve waited on that new laptop….

I was complaining to my friend Christa, who recently got her master’s in nursing, and she put me on to bigwords.com. The site searches all the stores for you and gives you a list of the cheapest place to buy all of them as a group and another list that gives you the best price for each individual book. The six books I needed for my class cost only $119 — less than half what they are at the university’s bookstore.

Know any other big ways for college students to save money?

Jeni Donlon is a deputy metro editor for The Commercial Appeal. A Hoosier and graduate of Indiana University’s School of Journalism, she came to Memphis in 1990 via Texas and Florida. She answers to a lot of titles: wife, editor, adjunct professor, Weight Watchers dropout, piano student, former PTA president and book club organizer, but mostly she answers to “Mom.” She is married and has two kids — Grace, 8, and John William, 10 — two cats and a dog.