Scholarships, ahhh scholarships. They are great. Free money for college. You don't have to pay them back. The only problem is, many parents begin to look for scholarship money for their children within the two year window of Junior and Senior year of high school -- better known as "THE BURN OUT YEARS."

Those are the harrowing years when everyone is looking for money for college, the competition is high and your kid is so burned out from SATs, ACTs, AP Exams, high-school exit exams, college applications, financial aid forms -- that you would be lucky that the kid is sane at the end of it all.

Or you can beat the crowd . . . like the happy stress-free mother of a Howard University bound student I met recently. She was almost gleeful when she told me that she didn't have to worry about funding her child's very expensive college tuition. Huh? Did she open a college fund and saved every penny since the kid was born? No. Did she have a rich mother-in-law? Nope. Did she rob a an ATM machine (not that they keep that much money in there). Nah.

Get this, she started looking for scholarship funds when her kid won a $750 scholarship in the fifth grade -- for a poster he drew! She started thinking, if she could find a few scholarships like this, then at least she'd be off to a good start on her son's college fund. So she started looking around and lo and behold, they were everywhere! Writing contests, drawing contests and other events . . . all with a payoff of scholarships. What beat it all, the kid wasn't out of elementary school yet.

Well, if that mother can luck up on college money for her kid, then I could do it too, right? So I got to searchin' and what I found was most scholarship events that allow younger kids to compete are not national -- they are local or association based. I also found that these scholarship opportunities are not promoted or announced, which means parents must activity search for them.

HOW TO FIND THEM . . .

(1) The best place to find these scholarship opportunities is by reading local newspapers for articles that announce this year's winners of scholarships. Usually the paper will tell you who sponsors the scholarship, look those sponsors up and call about next year's scholarship entry deadlines.

(2) The second best place to find these opportunities is through word-of-mouth. Ask everyone you know if their association, employer, fraternity/sorority is offering any scholarships and how to contact them for more information.

(3) You can also search for these scholarship opportunities through your favorite search engine, starting very locally with the name of your neighborhood or area, then school district, then go out to city and county-wide searches. For instance, I used these search terms in my search engine's search box (note the quotation marks, use quotation marks in your search engine searches to get better results):

"Hilltop, Berkeley, CA" scholarships -- immediate neighborhood search

"West County School District" scholarships -- school district search

"El Cerrito, CA" scholarships -- city-wide search

"Alameda County California" scholarships -- county-wide search

"San Francisco Bay Area" scholarships -- metro-wide search

For more information on finding scholarships, I recommend reading Get Free Cash for College, an excellent book on scholarship searching.