Browsing Category: "student"
Yes, you can get a cheap copy of Windows 7 from Microsoft themselves if you’re a student for £30, Home Premium edition.
http://www.microsoft.com/uk/education/studentoffer/
You can also get a copy of Microsoft Office from here.
If you’re in the US, it’s
5% Maplins (Electronics)
10% HMV, Virgin, (Music, DVDs, Books, Computer Games); Faith (Shoes); Dorothy Perkins, Oasis, Miss Selfridge, Peacocks (Clothing); PC World (Electronics); La Senza (Underwear) Subways (Food)
Also Student discounts at Odeon Cinema 
Marks & Spencers are doing a one day Christmas Spectacular tomorrow. this includes all womenswear, menswear, lingerie, kidswear, beauty, furniture, homeware, Christmas shop, wine and champagne.
Stores open from 8 am until late or online until midnight.
Just a fornight ago, Marks & Spencers did a similar event that sparked a shopping frenzy and other department stores started to cut down their prices to attract christmas shoppers. Debenhams and John Lewis matched these cuts.
Debenhams have offered a three day sale starting today. Littlewoods has offered 60% for 5,000 lines and 3 for 2 for toys until 23 December.
To attract more shoppers, stores have also rushed to add the VAT discount.
I have just finished the 4 hour work week: Escape the 9-5, Live Anywhere and Join the New Rich by Tim Ferris and I thoroughly enjoyed it! There were some really useful ideas in the book which I have applied and they work great.
To briefly go back in time, when I was a student, I had ideas all the time bouncing around in my head… as a student, brain activity (for most!) is important in getting your degree… in addition, all the thinking I was doing and with all the various people bouncing off ideas with each other, I frequently thought “what if I could design a bit of software which could do this?” The problem is that you should be exerting most of your energy thinking about your coursework and degree… I did do that but I also thought about how I could use technology to do things… however, with the studying and managing a student club, I just didn’t get the time.
In Tim Ferris’ book, he talks about outsourcing his life. What he has done is to outsource all the boring administrative time consuming work of the company he set up to virtual assistants! Now he swans around the globe travelling with his team of virtual assistants running the mundane day to day administrative duties. It’s a really clever concept and in our time constrained lives, it is a fantastic way to achieve more in less time.
Virtual assistants, and I’ll show you where you can find them, are people who are happy to do this work for you (for a fee of course). The vast majority of virtual assistants are based in India/Phillipines and they are happy to do what you are requiring for a fraction of the cost of hiring someone in the UK or US. Even as a student, you should be able to afford the help of a virtual assistant if you’ve got a fab idea… recently, I hired a virtual assistant for $3 for an hour to do some admin work on Excel spreadsheets. As a student, I wrote a lot of stuff down (as I didn’t have any money for a computer)… I could have scanned in all the notes I made and sent them off to a virtual assistant to type up!
Tim used Get Friday for his virtual assistant. However, reading reviews on the web have not been too great simply because Tim’s book was a roaring success and he has brought a lot of business to these guys and they are unable to cope. I have looked on the web and done my research, the company I recommend is Odesk.
Odesk allows you to list your projects and then you can either offer a fixed amount for a job or pay them an hourly rate. You can also filter prospective candidates for various skills. Odesk have proficiency tests which candidates can sit and you can filter on them to ensure that they have the proven skills you require. It could be basic administrative tasks, typing, database entry but you can also get people to design websites, build software applications etc. It certainly has made me change the way I view things and has saved me considerable time… perhaps I should outsource this blog typing to them also!!
Links:
Odesk
4 Hour Work Week
Welcome to the first post on Rich Poor Student! I know what it’s like to be a student, I was one many years ago and my girlfriend is a student. There were many things which I wished I knew then to help me navigate my way through the financial mess that I was in and this was when student grants were available. I was one of the last students who got a government living grant and also had my fees paid for me.. however, it was still difficult and you have to sacrifice a lot to ensure that you can afford the essentials.
Anyway, the students years were the best years of my life and with the knowledge I have now, I hope to be able to provide some useful information for those students of today.
So enjoy and feel free to drop me messages and I’ll endeavour to answer them!
