The most common question I hear from either prospective or current college students how can I pay for college?  What types of financial aid for college is there?   Well to be honest with you there are multiple ways to do and here is a list of the most common forms of financial aid……

1. Loans: There are multiple types of college loans available for students. The most common are government loans i.e. Stafford loans (either subsidized or Unsubsidized. Meaning you pay the interest while going to school (unsubsidized) or the government pays the interest (subsidized).Which one you qualify for is dependent on multiple factors including you income level, your parents income level, or if you are applying as a dependent of Independent student.For more information about federal Stafford loans check out  studentaid.gov.What about a loan that you potentially would not have to ever pay back?  Depending on what  career path you choose this could be possible with the Perkins Loan.  I will have a more in depth explanation on what the Perkins loan is all about, but one bit of advise about this loan in case you have one already is DO NOT CONSOLIDATE THIS LOAN!So… make sure you subscribe to our site and join our newsletter so you can get notified when that article is up… because it alone could save you a ton of time, headaches, and money.
2. Grants: A grant is a gift of money that you do not need to pay back!

There are two general types of grant programs for college students:
- Need based
- Merit based
The best way to see which one you qualify for is to fill out your FAFSA.  This is how the government determines which type of grants you are eligible for and automatically applies you for them.

We’re getting ready to do a few really good tutorials on how to find and get grants for college… but, in the meantime… here’s a link to a really good resource I found for ya on how to find grants for school.

3. Scholarships: As I had talked about in previous articles a scholarship is money given to you based on a number of  criteria.  There’s a lot of scholarships out there… especially some pretty weird scholarships you’d never even think exist.  Many are available to you just for getting good grades, while others are on weird stuff like scholarships for left handed people or who speak multiple languages.

You just never know unless you do some research……. and that’s what I have done for you!

A good place to start when looking for different scholarships is a database such as fastweb, there you can see all types of scholarships that you might qualify for!

The bottom line is there are an endless number of ways to find money to go to college.  I have only began to scratch the surface of what is out there.  If you have any comments/questions on what you think might be a reason for a scholarship let me know and I will see what I can find out for ya!

Let’s face it… college is an expensive as heck 4 years (or more for some of us). I mean, we have to pay tuition, food, housing, transportation, books (ridiculous!). By the time you’re done it can be $50,000 or more.

I think I’m a lot like you.

I graduated college a little over a year ago, NOT a straight A student, do some extra carricular activities… but not a ton,… and my parents don’t make a million bucks a year.

And guess what…

I was able to get $45,421 in free college scholarships which completely paid for every single dime of my college expenses. Nope, I’m not some smart dude that won a ton of academic scholarships (I did get a few though)… most of my scholarships came from other places and a little bit of hard work finding and applying for scholarships.

Anyhow, I want to “pay it forward” and tell you how I went about getting over $45,000 in scholarships… and how you can get free college scholarships too.

How (and where) I Found, Free College Scholarships To Apply For

Online:

One of the first places I went to find scholarships was the internet. There are a ton of free scholarships online… and after way too many hours of pounding away at the keyboard… I found some great places online to find scholarships.

You’ll even see one of the sites that I actually got a pretty darn big scholarship from… all for free.

Here are the places that I found the best list of free college scholarships… and these are the ones that aren’t all scammy (there are some scams out there… but the ones that are legit are written below).

Fastweb.com –

*(my favorite scholarship search site)

Fastweb is my favorite place to search for scholarships. It takes about 10 minutes to set up a free account (here’s a video of me showing how to set up an account at fastweb).I actually ended up getting a multi-thousand dollar scholarship from Fastweb… pretty cool stuff.

Why I like Fastweb

Fastweb is a cool site because it’s completely free and it has the largest database of scholarships that I was able to find. In the video I made of me creating a free account and doing a search… it came up with something like 35 scholarships that fit my criteria.

Also, Fastweb actually emails you every time a new scholarship comes up that fits your criteria (based on some questions they ask while setting up your free account). This is cool because you don’t have to log in all of the time to see if there are new scholarships for you… they tell you automatically.

Another reason is that in Fastweb they make it easy to see the deadlines for the scholarships and show you how to apply. When a scholarship deadline is a week or two away, they shoot you an email reminding you.

How I rate Fastweb Overall

Overall, I really love Fastweb. Like I said, I ended up getting a several thousand dollar scholarship from it… and it only takes like 10 minutes to set up a free account. Well worth it if you ask me.

If I had to rate Fastweb on a scale…

Ease of Use:
Number of Scholarships:
Best Chance of Finding Scholarships For You:
Overall:

So, overall… for me, Fastweb is something that EVERYONE looking for college scholarships should sign up for (once again it’s free!).

Check out Fastweb and watch the video of me setting up a free account over there.

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Free College Scholarships.net -

This website is a lot like Fastweb, but has some different scholarships. Overall, I liked Fastweb better, but this one is definitely worth using because I found that it had scholarships Fastweb didn’t have… and Fastweb had scholarships that Free College Scholarships didn’t have.Head over to Free College Scholarships <<

Why I Like This Site…

Like I said, this site isn’t as good (in my opinion) as Fastweb… but it is a great source to find some scholarships that Fastweb doesn’t have. They have a $10,000 scholarship giveaway themselves every few months… so that’s a bonus just for setting up a free scholarship search account.

As with Fastweb, this site has millions of dollars of free scholarships in their database… and make it pretty darn easy to search for ones that match your criteria. Just like Fastweb, they have to make their money somehow… so there are some ads during the process… but you can easily click “no” if you’re not interested. To me, this is a pain… but well worth it in the end because they come up with some great scholarships that I wasn’t able to find anywhere else.

How I Rate FreeCollegeScholarships.net Overall…

Overall this site is cool… but I would put more time into Fastweb if I were you. I actually signed up for free college scholarship search accounts on both sites (and a few others that ended up being scammy and crappy) and found it way easier to find scholarships on these sites than by doing my own searches on Google.

Ease of Use:
Number of Scholarships:
Best Chance of Finding Scholarships For You:
Overall:

There are other scholarship search sites out there… but they really aren’t worth linking to because they seemed to me to be a bit too scammy that I don’t feel comfortable sending you there (do searches for free scholarships… you’ll find the one’s I’m talking about).

So, head over to:

• Fastweb – Sign up for a free scholarship search account at Fastweb
• Free College Scholarships - Get a free account over there

Finding Scholarships Other Ways…

There are a ton of other ways that I went out and found college scholarships (online was the easiest)… and actually the most effective ways I found are:

• School Senior Counselor – Probably about 1/3 of my scholarships came from my high school senior counselors office. Just go in there and ask them for applications to scholarships… they usually have a ton of them that you can look through to see if they fit you.
• The Colleges You Apply For – About 1/2 of the scholarships I got ended up coming from the colleges I applied for. Every college has academic related scholarships that are mainly based off of your GPA and SAT scores… but, what most people forget is that most colleges have scholarship foundations. The whole purpose of these foundations is to give out scholarship money to incoming students. Find the scholarship foundations at the colleges you are applying to (through the financial aid office) and ask them for a list of scholarships.

There are a billion places to find people and organizations that want to give away money in the form of scholarships.

Here Are Some Other Articles That You Should Read To Improve Your Chances Of Getting Scholarships

• Resources for Free Scholarships
• Weird Scholarships – Scholarships most people don’t know about… but that a ton of people qualify for.
• How I Didn’t Pay A Dime for College – Gives you some tips on what to do to increase your chances of getting scholarships. Great read.