Dear Action Line: College is expensive enough without the bad advice we get from relatives and "former college students" on what first-year college students need. Set us straight on what they don't need. - E.L., Tulsa.
DealNews.com, the "premier resource for the best online deals on consumer electronics, gadgets, computers and apparel," offers eight tips on what not to buy college students.
Printer: Schools offer printing facilities that are free or cheap to use. Ink is expensive, not to mention annoying to replace. You think your kid could be popular being the only one with a printer, but once the ink runs out, the pool of printer friends dries up.
Tablet: In college settings, even budget laptops can better handle school-based tasks than iPads. Writing and editing term papers on a touch-screen is difficult. Function-for-function, laptops are cheaper. For the same $500 spent on a 16GB Apple iPad with Retina Display (bundled with a $50 Target gift card), you get a speedy, lightweight Windows laptop like the ASUS VivoBook Intel Ivy Bridge Core i3 1.8GHz 11.6-inch Touchscreen Laptop bundled with a four-year subscription to Microsoft Office 365 University for $359.
Expensive sleeping: Even if your teen's college isn't one that stocks its dorm rooms with extra-long mattresses (more common than not), you shouldn't buy special bedding. College buddies will destroy the whole setup by eating and drinking recklessly on the bed, so grab bargain-bin bedding deals instead of the 600-thread-count sheets.
HDTV: Kids don't need TVs in their rooms. Many millennials don't even watch TV - they take their shows and movies on Netflix, Hulu, YouTube, etc. So a laptop is all they need. If they want to watch museum pieces on broadcast TV, colleges have TVs in common rooms. And remind them college is for studying, not playing games on HDTVs.
High-end laptop: Many college students use their laptops for nothing more than word processing, Wikipedia-ing and watching TV. They don't need eight cores of Haswell processing to put words on a screen, despite attractive price points of the latest Haswell laptops. As laptops have become lighter and more portable, they're being brought far and wide but lugging a laptop all over campus increases damage likeliness.
External hard drive: With accessible and cheap cloud storage, there's no reason for the average student to own a portable hard drive. Documents for school can be uploaded to Google Drive or Dropbox and Facebook.
Apple iPhone: Though not typically considered a back-to-school item, if your kid needs a new iPhone right before school starts, hold off. New iPhone models are released shortly after school starts, but DealNews archives also show that whenever Apple announces a new product, current generation Apple products fall in price.
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Original Print Headline: What college kids don't need
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Edmunds.com last week released its annual list of Best Used Cars for 2013, a list of 17 cars across every segment based on "the most important criteria: reliability, safety, value and availability."
Dear Action Line: I received a mailing from the IRS and wonder if this is typical. I thought all such notices came by email. Should I call the Tulsa IRS on this? - B.N., Tulsa
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