None of us want to think about how much we need to save to put our kids through college. It’s around $250,000 for a four-year college so if you haven’t already, you better get saving right away. You’ll need to get yourself a savings account and start filling it with as much of your surplus income as you can afford, but that still might not be enough. Most of us probably don’t earn enough to put away that much money, and if you’ve got more than one child then it’s even more unrealistic. That means you’ll need to start making small changes and coming up with some other ways of raising extra cash to put into the family college fund. Try these ideas to boost your kid’s college fund.

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Credit Card Rewards

Lots of credit card companies these days offer cashback rewards if you spend a certain amount of them each month. This can be a nice little reward for yourself, but if you start putting all of that extra money into your college fund, it can soon add up to a significant amount. Cards that offer 1% cashback on purchases can get you around $250 a year if you spend an average of $2000 a month. While that doesn’t sound like a huge amount of cash, it will add up to $4500 by the time they are eighteen if you start when they are born. If you can get a better rewards deal then you’ll have even more.

Sell Your Hair

This might not sound like a normal way to start saving cash but it’s actually incredibly lucrative. Prices can be as high as $1000 if your hair is long enough so if you sold it once a year, you could get up to $18000 to put towards the college fund. Follow these tips from stay-a-stay-at-home-mom.com to learn exactly how to do it. If you’re going to sell your hair, make sure that it isn’t dyed otherwise the price will be significantly lowered.

Make Money While You Browse The Internet

We all spend a lot of time on the internet so you might as well make a bit of extra cash while you’re there. There are plenty of apps out there that can help you to do this, although lots of people have discredited them because the earnings seem relatively small. This is true in the long-term but it doesn’t take any extra time and over the years it will add up. On sites like swagbucks.com, you get points for clicking ads, doing surveys and searching using their site instead of Google. You can earn around $30 a month on there which doesn’t seem like much but over eighteen years it adds up to almost $6480; that’s a big amount to add to your fund.

Sell Their Old Stuff

It’s their education so they should be helping out as well. Over the course of their childhood, they’ll build up a huge collection of toys and clothes that they’ll soon outgrow. Instead of chucking it all out or passing it on to friends and family, why not sell it. Every year or two you can have a big clear out and sell it all online. Put all the extra money into the college fund and you can knock another big chunk off your savings goal.