Resources > Student Guides & Worksheets
Student Guides & Worksheets
Paying for college gets a lot less stressful when you can see the numbers. These free, printable guides and worksheets from Abe® help students and families plan, borrow, and manage the cost of college.
Student Budgeting Worksheet
Most students don’t overspend on purpose. They overspend because nobody ever showed them the full list. Tuition and rent are easy to remember. The quiet budget killers are the $250 textbook, the course fee nobody mentioned until it hit the bill, and the takeout that replaces every meal during finals week.
This worksheet lays out every category on a single page: school costs, fixed expenses, variable spending, subscriptions, and income. Fill it in once and you get a real number for what’s left at the end of the month. Page two adds six budgeting tactics that work for college students, including how to review subscriptions each semester and why budgeting for wants keeps you from quitting the budget entirely.
Understanding Credit: A College Student’s Guide to Credit Scores
A credit score is a three-digit number, usually between 300 and 850, that lenders use to estimate how likely you are to repay what you borrow. Higher scores generally mean better approval odds and lower interest rates. Five things build that number: your payment history, how much you owe, how long you’ve had credit, new applications, and the mix of account types you have open. Payment history and debt owed account for nearly two thirds of the score, which is good news, because those are the two you control most directly.
Credit matters more for college families than it used to. Federal loans often don’t cover the full cost of attendance, and recent changes to federal borrowing limits mean more families are covering that gap on their own. Private student loans can help fill it, and private lenders look at credit to decide who qualifies and at what rate. That makes your score, or your cosigner’s, one of the few parts of paying for college you can actually improve before you apply.
This guide covers what goes into a score, how to build one from scratch with a student credit card, how to protect the one you have with auto pay and low utilization, and how to dispute errors.
Understanding Cosigning: What a Cosigner Does and When You Need One
A cosigner is someone with established credit and steady income who agrees to share responsibility for a loan with the student. Most college students need one, because recent high school grads usually haven’t had time to build the credit history and income private lenders look for. You don’t need a cosigner to apply for an Abe loan, but having one can improve your chances of approval, and it can get you a better rate even if you’d qualify on your own.
The part that deserves a real conversation is what cosigning means for the other person. The loan shows up on both credit reports, and payment history moves both scores in the same direction, good or bad. This guide explains who can cosign, from parents and grandparents to an aunt, uncle, or mentor, what the risks look like on both sides, and how Early Cosigner Release works. It also covers the habits that protect everyone: pay on time every time, and tell your cosigner before you miss a payment, not after.
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Tip: applying with a creditworthy cosigner may improve your approval odds and lower your interest rate.