FAP324: Financial Hack du jour, PRWeb everywhere, scholarship tidbits, Kevin Reeves

Student Financial Aid News
+ The Financial Aid Podcast on CollegeRecruiter.com
+ And on PRWeb
+ For more information about graduate PLUS loans, visit GradLoans.com
+ For more information about alternative student loans, visit privatestudentloans.com
+ Nelnet switches to electronic transfer after data losses. The move follows an incident in mid-July when Nelnet announced it lost tapes containing data for 188,000 college students. The company says there is still no evidence the information has been misused.
+ The Secretary of Education’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education released the next iteration of its report Thursday, which for those of you scoring at home is the third partial draft and the first truly complete one (it contains not only the preamble and summary that were missing from its second draft but, for the first time, a conclusion, too).
+ Will Facebook be a player this fall? Time will tell – but you do get to declare your political affiliations on it, making it ripe for recruitment
+ When I chose mine, oddly enough, there was no “You’re all a bunch of idiots in both parties and my cat could do better”

Scholarship Update
+ The next version of the Scholarship Search Secrets book will be…
+ A wiki
+ Tune in on Monday as we debut FinancialAidWiki.com
+ The goal will be to make it a really good resource for all things financial aid
+ AND in there will be the Scholarship Search Secrets e-book, which instead of being a static PDF will be a living document
+ Set your bookmarks now!
+ Also a reminder about our Scholarship Points site, ScholarshipPoints.com
+ Finally, someone inquired on MySpace about the lefthanded scholarship
+ Juniata College Mary Francis Beckley Left Handed Scholarship

Financial Hacks
+ One of the toughest part about budgeting is keeping track of expenses
+ Very few of us have many streams of income
+ Most of us have a lot of streams of expense
+ The one page budget can get difficult if you don’t keep track
+ So how do you keep track?
+ Use recording methods! A few hacks
+ Text message yourself on IM – make sure you have an IM running somewhere that logs your chats
+ Hipster – a stack of index cards or business cards
+ Make a custom set of business cards that just say expense, date, amount. Carry those and a small pencil or pen.
+ K7 free voicemail – program into your cell phone, leave a message for yourself with transaction data, and the MP3 will be waiting in your inbox
+ Start your speed dial with a space or the letter A so it’s always at the top of your phone list – then when you spend, record and send
+ Bonus hack – download all your personal finance MP3s to your iPod or player, put on your headphones, and listen to them in sequence as you do your budget. Pause and play as needed.
+ Bonus hack – use GMail as the account things get mailed to, set up a label called personal finance, and create a filter to flag K7 emails as personal finance with a label
+ When you do your one page budget, just go into GMail and click on that label and boom! you have your expense report

Podsafe Music
+ Kevin Reeves, Throw Me A Line
+ Music via the Podsafe Music Network

Reminders
+ Student loans available at any time – visit privatestudentloans.com
+ Get a federal student loan at StaffordLoan.com
+ Consolidate your student loans at StudentLoanConsolidator.com
+ Financial Aid Podcast Show Notes at FinancialAidNews.com.
+ The Financial Aid Podcast is a publication of the Student Loan Network.

Questions? Comments? Suggestions? Email me at financialaidpodcast {at} gmail {dot} com, visit http://www.FinancialAidPodcast.com. Add me to your iTunes by visiting http://www.FinancialAidPodcast.com/subscribe/

Direct file download: MP3 file

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