College students receive billions of dollars in scholarship money every year. How can you get some of this money to fund your college education?

Start looking early Start looking for scholarships at least by your sophomore or junior year in high school. Some scholarships are even awarded as early as junior high. Where to look? Your first stop should be your high school counseling office, followed by your college financial aid office. Other places to look include

-Civic and community organizations -Cultural institutions -Your parents’ place of employment -Your state Department of Education -The internet

Keep looking Keep searching for new scholarships and renewing existing scholarships even after you begin college. Many scholarships need to be renewed annually, and you may qualify for new loans throughout your college years.

What exactly is gearing? It's basically another word for leverage. Imagine you want to buy a $100,000 home. The bank or lender, if prudent, will want you to put some of your own money up - to share risk. If you are buying your own home, they traditionally want you to stump up between 5 and 15% to show you are serious. If you are buying an 'investment' property, until fairly recently lenders wanted you to cough up about 25% (many lenders have recently relaxed these criteria - they will undoubtedly be punished for it by market later!).

On a $100,000 property, that would mean $25k - i.e. your leverage or gearing on property would be x4 (the value of property divided by deposit). He has borrowed $75k and put down only a third of that. In a rising market, that means that for every $25,000 property rises in price, he effectively doubles his money! So property only has to rise by a quarter, and he reaps a 100% growth in actual cash put down to buy property in first place. Are rises of that size possible? Yes - many parts of world have recently seen strings of years where prices rose at least 25% year on year.

So far so good, but what does your typical buy-to-let landlord do when presented with a $25k windfall? Yes, that's right. He re-mortgages property #1 and buys property #2 using extra $25k he just 'made'. Wow. Free money! He can actually buy another $100,000 house with this 'new' deposit (it will be a smaller house, or in worse condition than first one of course, because houses like #1 now cost $125k!).