The site is OPEN!

I figured I'd put a little introduction here, just to let anybody who's curious know how this site originated and who the administrator is.

Hi, my name is Nik. I'm a mousy first year college student at CGS. Like many students, I'm alone in my financial burden because my parents want me to be independent, and because the current economic situation is hard on all but the most wealthy of families. Now I am not an individual who did a lot of side work in high school. I was more interested in watching Anime and hanging out with friends than in working when my parents paid for the few extra expenses I asked for. But once I entered college, I realized that it wouldn't cut it anymore. I survived my first semester with a bank account not quite empty, but by the time my second scemester rolled around, I found myself in debt to my mother (and no one wants to be indebted to a power-hungry businesswoman). Just the IDEA of her having something to hold over my head was a scary thought, and I was DETERMINED to avoid a repeat performance next year. Even worse, the textbooks from the previous semester were nearly impossible to sell back, and if I could sell them back, they were sold at less than 10% of its original price. So I thought about it, and came to this conclusion.

A lot of older students buy their new books cheaper by finding students in higher grades who took the same classes, and buying it off of them. This way the older students could get some real money back for their older expenses, and the younger students could circumvent the inflated prices of a new edition of the same book with a few typos fixed. Now the problem with this system is that you have to hunt down these upperclassman yourself, and any student would be shy to ask someone if they just so happen to have had the same teacher as yourself last year, let alone if they have the same exact books and didn't give into the temptation of selling them on ebay or falling into the trap of selling them to the school for pittance.

Why not make it digital? with the massive use of the internet, almost every student at an american school has experienced a forum of some sort and knows how they work. Why not make a community based entirely on saving money for a minority defined by their LACK of money (specifically students.)

So thats how this started. I prefer simple setups to overcomplications, and this site is just getting started, so I like to think of it as a work-in-progress, and progress can't happen without an audience pointing out flaws and potential changes. So don't hesitate to PM me with any suggestions you may have.