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Enter your name and email below to learn everything you need to know about writing your personal statement, including:

• Choosing a topic
• How to easily tailor your personal statement for each school’s requirements
• Understanding your audience
• How to stand out from the crowd
• How to write a personal statement, not a resume or autobiography
• How to hook the reader’s attention
• The art of telling a good story supported by specific examples
• What you must absolutely avoid in your personal statement
• Understanding the fundamentals of academic writing
• How to strongly conclude your personal statement

Write about yourself. Do it now. Thanks!

The abrupt nature of this demand combined with a lack of practice will usually result in bad writing. From miniature autobiographies to abstract musings on current events, such topics typically obliterate a personal statement’s relevance, cohesiveness, and flow.

Whether for academic or professional purposes, we rarely discuss our personal narratives. The unfortunate reality is that most people have not had practice writing about themselves in years if ever—resulting in ineffective and inappropriate personal statement topics. To put it simply, you’re not alone! And that’s why we’re here to help.

In the following article, we will discuss tendencies to avoid when writing your law school personal statement. We will also provide critical guidelines for effective writing that you can use in all of your application documents.

1) Have One Theme and Discuss One to Three Experiences That Support It

As previously mentioned, avoid writing your life story in your personal statement. Firstly, there is just not enough room to do so. The typical law school personal statement has a two-page limit double-spaced (See Law School Personal Statement Formatting: What You Need To Know for specifics on format). Trying to cram all the interesting tales from your life into these two pages is impossible. Conform your writing to the limited space provided by the format.

Choose relevant experiences you have had that can fit together cohesively and convey the value you will bring to a law school’s student body. Be concise and get straight to the point. Sometimes, this means cutting out certain parts of your story that do not fit or do not support your underlying theme.

Whether overcoming adversity, pursuing your passion, or the next logical step in your career, you should have a single solid theme. It should encompass all the experiences you describe in your personal statement’s story. This is not an exhaustive list of theme types, but you can click here for more help with personal statement ideas.

Your theme will usually develop as you begin to discuss your experiences. One to three exemplary and/or touching experiences are really all that are needed to provide the body content of your personal statement. More than this can start to sound like a rehashing of your resume, a list of accomplishments, or just a description of how bad you’ve had it up to this point in your life. None of which will sound appealing to the admissions committee members reading your essay. To catch their attention, maintain it, and hopefully garner some respect from the people deciding your law school fate, keep it simple. Use one theme and up to three experiences as examples to support it.

2) Stay Professional; Don’t Take It Personally

Certain topics you may discuss in your application documents, especially for personal statements, diversity statements, and addendums, can evoke powerful emotions. It is vital that you are able to discuss these issues in a professional manner. Taking something personally, demonizing a specific person or group of people, or just having an overly negative tone can turn off the reader(s) to your writing whether they agree with you or not.

For this reason, avoid the following things that can make you sound informal:

• Writing as if you are making a journal entry
• Coming off as desperate, facetious, or sarcastic
• Being overly emotional
• Discussing intimate details of your personal life
• Being overly negative
• Harping on feuds between you and another person or group
• Describing situations and events with generalizations rather than facts
• Making assumptions, especially about the law or the legal field
• Expressing your unsupported opinions on controversial topics
• Being self-aggrandizing
• Boasting about your achievements or expressing arrogant behavior

Be realistic with your experiences. The sentiment among popular culture to constantly promote one’s self at the expense of others is not appropriate for an application document. Being humble sounds more realistic, and sounding more realistic will make you more believable as a candidate anyway.

Gaining the trust of admission committee members is key. The personal statement is usually the most prominent and sometimes the only document in your application that can create that trust. Cut out anything that may sound conceited whether you meant it to sound that way or not. We can help you with this.

3) Keep It Simple—Sentence Structure, Punctuation, and Grammar

While I write this blog article with impunity to formal criticism for my use of contractions, colloquialisms, informal use of prepositions, liberal use of commas and subordinating conjunctions, lengthy introductory clauses, sentences exceeding three full lines, and series and lists that never seem to end, you don’t have the same discretion if your application documents are being evaluated by admissions committees, which they will be.

As with other Gradvocates editors, I would very much like to split that previous sentence into more concise, easier-to-read phrases. I know that it would be more digestible for the reader. Alas, it is a perfect example of the informality we see in many applicants’ writing—both in what it describes and how it’s written. To lessen confusion, we strive to prevent unnecessary complexity in sentence structure at Gradvocates. You may feel the urge to squeeze every idea you have into one big, ugly, compound, run-on mess, but brevity is almost always preferred.

Here are some simple guidelines you can use to evaluate the structure of your sentences:

• Try to keep your sentences under two full lines max.
• Avoid colloquialisms, clichés, slang, and popular sayings as they are not professional or original.
• Don’t over-complicate your punctuation. This is law school—not a graduate English program.
• Avoid common wording errors that experienced writers notice .
• Use a comma before and if you are going to list out things in a series—American English prefers it, and legal writing requires it 99% of the time to avoid confusion.
• Don’t use contractions. We can because this blog is not an application document!
• Keep your introductory phrases short and under control, or it could get confusing.
• Don’t end a sentence with a preposition. Use the preposition and which instead.
• Don’t use words with which you are not familiar. Admission Committee Members can tell. This is especially true for legal terminology. You are not a lawyer yet, so be particularly careful when trying to utilize legal terms in your personal statement. We suggest against it unless you have had firsthand experience in a legal position or with that area of the law in your current profession. Otherwise, you can sound foolish at best or mistakenly admit to the unauthorized practice of law at worst.
• Keep your verb tense consistent. Only change it when necessary.
• Use active voice rather than passive where possible. This shows that you are confident about your decision-making.

Quality formal writing relies on using simple, straight-forward sentences. Succinct phrases that demonstrate your experiences and how they make you a great candidate are all it takes structurally. Your content is a different story and a different blog article.

4) Cohesiveness: The Importance of Transitions

Your personal statement needs to read as if it is one cohesive story. This means your theme should be consistent throughout your paper. The experiences you detail should support your theme and bolster your argument for why you are an exceptional candidate.

The introductory phrases and prepositions between paragraphs and sentences should help demonstrate how your experiences are connected. They should allow the reader to understand how all these ideas are related and set forth a logical flow to your story. If a transition from one part of your essay to the next seems disjointed, you can lose the reader’s attention.

Good transitions help strengthen the plausibility of your theme, which helps build trust with your reader. This is why you need to be sure that your experiences fit together under the theme you’ve chosen. If you are unable to effectively transition from one part of your essay to the next, you may want to consider revising or eliminating the experience that does not currently fit with your overall theme. You can always substitute it with another experience or go more in depth into current topics in your essay.

Read over your personal statement several times. Have others read it to get more than one opinion. Be sure to ask whether they think the story is strong and cohesive or if any idea or aspect should be altered or left out. It’s good to get this out of the way early on in the writing process—on your first or second draft, as having to rewrite a large portion of a disjointed personal statement is no fun, especially when you believe you’re almost finished.

5) Remember Your Audience and Tailor Your Document to Them

Again, you are writing to get into law school. The law is all about wording and language. The absence or addition of a single comma can change the entire meaning of a clause in a contract—leading to major legal battles. Therefore, punctuation and grammar are very important in this document. It’s the reader’s preview of how you think and write. Be aware of this, and review your personal statement several times before submitting it along with your application.

The rule with legal writing is that less is more. Lawyers write for meaning and understanding. They do not try to embellish their words. Be direct and succinct. Make your point in as few words as necessary to convey the meaning you intend to communicate—no more and no less.

Obviously, your writing should meet professional standards grammatically, as we talked about previously in this article. But be mindful that even though you are applying to law school, you are not expected to know the law. Don’t feel compelled to try to explain it to professors and senior faculty that obviously know it better than you do at this point. Your personal statement is not only a story, but it is a list of qualities conveyed through a narrative that you have actually lived. These tangible qualities portrayed through your experiences are what admissions committee members are looking to see, not your legal acumen.

Finally, remember to change your institution-specific information in each version of your personal statement if you are applying to multiple law schools. You do not need to rewrite your entire personal statement from scratch unless a school has a very specific prompt that you’re required to address. However, be sure to change the school and program names at the very least.

If a law school has a specific program that you are interested in, be sure to mention it in that version of your personal statement. If there are certain extra-curricular activities or organizations at a school that spark your interest, include them where relevant. The point is to try to customize your personal statement to make it more relevant for each school without rewriting it entirely.

6) Use Concrete Examples. Limit Abstractions.

A major problem for law school applicants is the use of abstractions in their personal statements. You should not be discussing legal theory or other complex topics in depth in your personal statement. The reasons are twofold. You can get into trouble by misinterpreting legal concepts, let alone complex terminology in other fields of study. More importantly, any room used to discuss theoretical circumstances is not room being used to discuss you and your experiences. It is your personal statement after all; it should focus on you and what you have done—less so on things you plan to do in the future or that may never occur.

Applicants tend to fall into this trap because they feel like their current experiences aren’t good enough for a law school personal statement. This usually isn’t true. Although there are limitations on what law school admissions want to see content-wise in your personal statement, such as unexceptional activities from high school and before, pretty much anything else can be used as a valid experience. You just have to convey how it made you a better person. As long as you demonstrate your efforts using tangible examples of your experiences, you’re set. Debating the merits of topics with which you have no real-world experience should be avoided.

Talk about your passions, profession, extra-curricular activities, leadership roles, civic and volunteer involvement, your work and internship experience, how you became interested in law, how you are unique, your perspective and what led to it, your skillsets and technical knowledge, etc. There are plenty of topics you can weave together to form your story. Just be sure to do it in an engaging manner that puts the reader on your side and shows your value as a potential law school student.

Some Final Thoughts:

Writing about yourself in a professionally appropriate manner can be difficult at first. This important document needs to discuss personal details of your life concisely and thoughtfully to an admissions committee looking for reasons to deny people. It is not always clear what can be seen as informal. This makes getting a second opinion on your work a must.

Read over your personal statement several times. If you ever get stuck, sleep on it and come back to it later. Sometimes, taking a break for a day or two can help you see your writing from a new angle. This can help you generate new ideas on how to develop it further.

Finally, always have your writing reviewed. More opinions are always better than just your own. As with any formal application document, get your personal statement reviewed and edited by a professional. This is where Gradvocates can help. Let our experienced personal statement editors help you perfect your law school personal statement.

For even more helpful tips, see: How to Write a Great Personal Statement.

Let us know your thoughts by commenting below, and feel free to share this article with those who may find it helpful.

If you were wondering how to format your law school personal statement, this is how it should be done. Please note that we are using Microsoft Office’s Word 2010 to make our formatting adjustments, so if you have a different version of Word or are using another word processor, the procedure may be slightly different. However, the end result should be the same.

Format Guidelines

Your law school personal statement should abide by the following formatting guidelines:

• 0.5 inch indentations
• 0 pt space Before each line
• 0 pt space After each line
• Line spacing should be Double
• Don’t add space between paragraphs of the same style
• 1.0 inch margins on all sides
• 12 pt Times New Roman font
• Justified Alignment (Optional)

Header Format

As we discussed previously in our Personal Statement Header Format article, your document should contain a header in the upper-right corner of every page. It should include:

• Your Last Name, First Name right-aligned
• Page Numbers on each page
• Your LSAC Account Number
• Document Type (Personal Statement)
• Finally, leave a line blank below your header to create a space between it and your body text on the proceeding lines.

Step-by-Step Formatting Walkthrough

First, you are going to want to right-click in the body of your document (i.e. you should no longer be in your header). Then select Paragraph to open up the paragraph formatting options screen.

Make sure you are on the Indents and Spacing tab. You will be changing the defaults for four options on this screen.

First, under Indentation, click where it says (none) under Special. Select the option called First line. This will automatically indent the first line of every paragraph by a half inch. If it does not default to 0.5″ under By:, then use the down or up arrow to adjust until the indent is set to 0.5 inches.

Next, under Spacing, click the down arrow next to After: until you reach 0 pt. This will get rid of any space that would automatically be added after each line of text in your body paragraphs. Make sure that both Before: and After: are set to 0 pt, as you do not want any extra space before or after each line.

Under Line Spacing, click the dropdown arrow and select Double. This will make your body paragraphs double-spaced.

Then, click the check box to Don’t add space between paragraphs of the same style. Click OK to accept all changes thus far.

Next, click the Page Layout tab. Click the Margins box, and select Normal, which should be one-inch margins on all sides. Otherwise, go down to the bottom of that menu and click Custom Margins. There, you can manually change each side to one inch.

Click the Home tab. Select the font option and click on Times New Roman. You may have to scroll down a bit in order to see this if Times New Roman isn’t in your Recently Used Fonts box.

Next, click the font size box. Select 12 pt.

Finally, we suggest changing your text alignment to Justify. Although not required, we believe justified body paragraphs look better and are easier to read. This last step is optional however. Left-alignment is on by default if you choose not to make this change.

We suggest adjusting your document’s formatting first before you begin writing your essay. This way, you will be more aware of how much space you have for your story from the beginning. This is important as being able to accurately determine how long your story will be with the correct formatting will allow you to focus on refining your story without wasting extra time and energy later. Otherwise, you can spend hours writing more or less than you should be—only to find out later that you have to delete or add large parts of your story in order to match your formatting after you’ve already finished writing! Don’t do this. Format first!

After you have your formatting completed, remember to keep your writing within the page limits set in your law school’s application document requirements. Keep this in mind as you write your essay, as it will allow you to focus your ideas and stay concise. Page limits will differ from law school to law school. Typically, your personal statement should be about two-pages double-spaced. However, be sure to check with each law school’s website to which you are applying and always cross-reference this information with what appears on the Law School Data Assembly Service (LSDAS) on the LSAC website (LSAC.org). The information contained on LSAC’s Credential Assembly Service (CAS) should have the most up-to-date information for each school.

Gradvocates Law School Personal Statement Editing

We make sure you have a proper formatting when we thoroughly review and edit your personal statement document. Click here to learn more about Gradvocates law school personal statement editing services, and check out the rest of our blog for tips and relevant information to help you throughout the application process.

If you need assistance with making any of your other law school application documents the best they can be, check out our law school application document editing services or contact us if the document you need help with is not listed on our website.

We hope this information was helpful. Feel free to share and link to this article, and be sure to join the discussion below.

Much of the application process now takes place online. Some schools have you submit your personal statement in a web form directly, which would negate the need for a header. However, when required to upload a Word file of your personal statement or send a paper copy with your application documents, be sure to include a proper header.

To Insert a Header in Word

Click on the Insert tab.

Select the Header drop-down menu.

Once selected, scroll down to the bottom and click on Edit Header.

Click the Right-Align button to right-justify your header text. Now you are ready to type in your header information, which we will discuss below.

Also note that you may want to insert your page number first before entering any other information. Inserting a page number using the Insert Tab will hide any current information in your header. We discuss how to insert a page number later on in this blog article.

The following are a few general guidelines for what you should have in your law school personal statement header.

Leave Out a Title

A title for your personal statement is unnecessary, as it is not a short story you would write for an English literature class. It is your personal story crafted specifically for law school, which happens to be in a narrative style. For this reason, refrain from including a pithy title even though it might feel so right.

Include Your Full Proper Name

Your personal statement should contain your full legal name in the top-right-hand corner of each page. We suggest using the Last Name, First Name format, as it can make candidate identification easier when being reviewed by Law School Admission Committee Members.

Cut or Copy this so that you can reinsert it once you have added page numbers to your header.

Include Page Numbers

Typically, personal statements are limited to two pages. Some schools will allow for longer personal statements. As long as an application document is more than one page, page numbers should be used. Put your page number to the right of your name. Your entire header should be right-aligned. Because we read right-to-left and stapled documents are stapled in the upper left corner, we suggest right-aligned headers for easy visibility. If you have a long name or prefer your page numbers to appear somewhere else, you can place your page identifier in the center of your document footer.

To Insert Page Numbers in Word

Select the Page Number drop-down menu. Click Top of Page. This should display various page number formats and alignments. As we previously mentioned, you may want to do this first before adding your name or any other information to your header as doing so will clear out this information anyway.

Click on the right-aligned Plain Number 3 option.

This should insert a page number on all pages of your document using your standard document font. Typically, Times New Roman font should be used for writing your personal statement. Change your header and page number font to Times New Roman if they are not already. You can paste your full name as described in the previous section back into your header at this point. Leave a space between the page number and your name.

Include Your LSAC Account Number

Use the line below your name in your header to include your LSAC number.

You will most likely submit your document through the LSAC website. As mentioned here: http://www.lsac.org/jd/apply/lsac-account-number.asp, the LSAC prefers that your LSAC account number appear on all documents and correspondence with them and in your application. Many schools like to see applicants’ LSAC numbers on documents for easy candidate identification as well.

Identify the Document Type

You may be submitting several essays, a resume or CV, along with other documents in your application. We suggest indicating the type of document (Personal Statement) in your header under your LSAC number if you have room.

If running short on room in your document, this part of the header can be eliminated to save space for more important story content.

For information on overall personal statement formatting, see our Guide to Law School Personal Statement Formatting. Also, be sure to check with each school’s respective website and application instructions on the LSAC’s Credential Assembly Service for specific details on document formatting requirements. The LSAC website should be the most up-to-date resource for each school’s application instructions. If there happens to be a discrepancy between the application instructions on the school’s website and www.lsac.org, contact the school’s admissions department to clarify before submitting your application.

Gradvocates Law School Personal Statement Editing

We make sure you have a proper header when we analyze and thoroughly review your personal statement document. Click here for more information on our law school personal statement editing service, and check out the rest of our blog for helpful tips and interesting stories.

If you need assistance with making any of your other law school application documents the best they can be, check out our law school application document editing service or contact us if the document you need help with is not listed on our website.

We hope this article was helpful. Please share your comments with us below.

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“Debt is the slavery of the free.”
—Publilius Syrus

A Startling Revelation

Almost one year after graduating law school, Gary sat at his desk, mentally preparing himself for the tedious task of sorting through a large stack of motions, petitions, and other correspondence sent to the judge for whom he worked. It was the seventh month of his clerkship, a job which involved researching and preparing lengthy opinions disposing of issues in a broad array of civil cases, including professional malpractice, personal injury, contract disputes, insurance coverage, and zoning issues.

Gary was confident that he had seen it all, at least until he came across a motion asking the court to enter judgment against the defendant in the amount of $250,000.00. This was a pretty common request—if a defendant does not respond to a lawsuit within a certain amount of time, the plaintiff can ask the court for a default judgment. Afterwards, the plaintiff can begin collecting on that judgment by levying on bank accounts and property or by garnishing the defendant’s wages from his or her job.

But this motion was different. The defendant was a recent college graduate who had taken out $200,000.00 in student loans but failed to make regular payments. The plaintiff was an infamous corporation that that buys the debts of others at a discount then viciously seeks legal recourse against the debtor to collect whatever they can. The amount requested included $50,000.00 in attorney’s fees.

“Oh shit,” Gary exclaimed in disbelief.

Disturbed, Gary logged on to his own Sallie Mae account. Although he had been faithfully paying the monthly required amount on his loans, he realized that the principal had not budged. In fact, the principal on many of his loans reflected a greater amount than what he had borrowed.

Gary realized that, although he was extremely knowledgeable about the law, he did not fully understand his student loans or general financial situation. Gary vowed to get to the bottom of this.

An Epidemic of Financial Ignorance

“Asking an 18-year-old with little to no experience how to invest $100,000 is really a bit mad.”
—Benjamin Little

Gary is not alone. So many college and graduate students willingly take out student loans to help pay for tuition, books, and living expenses without realizing the full consequences of their actions. They exist in a three- or four-year fantasy in which the focus is getting good grades, earning prestigious internships, and growing close to new friends and acquaintances. They, unfortunately, pay little attention to their financial situation.

For example, consider the following recent posts on Twitter:

• “Financial aid/student loans is too confusing.”
• “I love how looking at my student loans can make me cry… I swear they don’t get smaller.”
• “Two payments made on student loans so far! Only 358 to go…”
• “Been out of law school for 8 months & I still have not fully sorted out evry1 I owe money to in student loans. #anothersurprisebill”
• “If anyone with student loans wants a good laugh, go check out your ‘net worth’ on your bank’s online services.”
• “Got my student loans deferred for 12 months. #winning” Note: this person is not “winning” as her unpaid interest will increase her principal. See below.

The authors of this post work for Gradvocates Editing, a business that edits personal statements, resumes, and other documents for students seeking to get into law school, graduate school, or college. We also edit resumes and cover letters for anyone trying to get a job. Nothing is more satisfying than helping a deserving individual fulfill his or her dreams. However, we strongly believe that to achieve the full benefits of your degree after graduation, you need a solid financial education.

So let’s get started.

Demystifying Student Loans

We first ask—no, we require—that you watch the following clip, which is the pure truth as spoken by Suze Orman:

Here’s what makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. Student loan debt is the only debt that in 99.9999999% of the cases cannot be discharged in bankruptcy. The federal loan debt that you can incur from the Stafford Loans usually does not pay for the cost of a university education. So you end up doing what? Getting private student loan debts from banks. Banks aren’t regulated like the federal government, where the maximum interest rate on a Stafford Loan is 6.8%, on a Plus Loan you’re looking at 7.9%, 8%…bank loans have the ability to go to 15, 18, 19%. And the United States government bankruptcy laws protect those banks. The banks can screw you with the interest rates that they charge you, and you do not have any rights whatsoever to say “I cannot afford this.” Then the system allows you to defer your student loans, to do forbearance on your student loans. What does that mean? It simply means that you don’t have to pay it right away but the interest continues to accumulate. . . . When you don’t pay it back, [banks] are thrilled. They are thrilled because [the interest] starts to compound and compound and compound and $40,000 turns into $80,000 turns into $150,000 and then you think you’ve been getting away with something because you haven’t been able to pay it and then they contact you and you have got to pay back that $150,000. You can’t. What do they do? They will garnish your wages even if you’re old enough when this happens, they will garnish your social security checks. So when you are taking out student loans, parents out there, when you are cosigning a private student loan, you better be very, very careful.

First, it is important to understand some basis concepts of student loans.

Principal:

The principal is the amount of the loan that you took out. For example, if you borrowed $15,000.00, then $15,000.00 is the principal. You pay interest on your principal until it is paid back in full. The principal amount of the loan will increase if unpaid interest “capitalizes” as more fully described below.

Interest:

Interest is the fee that the lender charges for loaning you the principal. It is how the lender makes its money.

How Interest Accrues:

Interest accrues on a daily basis and is calculated in the following manner.

Daily interest amount = (Current Principal Balance x Interest Rate) ÷ 365.25

Therefore, if the Principal balance is $15,000.00 and the interest rate is 8.5%, the following calculation should be used (first convert 8.5% to a decimal by dividing by 100, which is 0.085):

Daily Interest Amount = (15,000.00 x 0.085) ÷ 365.25

This means that our Daily Interest Amount is $3.49.

Alternatively, you could use the following formula to quickly calculate the approximate interest due each month. So we don’t have to account for varying amount of days in each month, we will use the following formula for the rest of the article.

Monthly Interest Amount = (Current Principal Balance x Interest Rate) ÷ 12

This means that for a loan of $15,000.00 at 8.5%, you will be paying about $106.25 each month. But wait, there’s more! The principal of “amortization” has to be taken into account with all payments made. This is more fully described below.

Repayment Plans and Minimum Monthly Payment:

When your loans become due, you will need to make monthly payments to the student loan provider. Your minimum monthly payment depends on what repayment plan you pick. Read about them here http://studentaid.ed.gov/repay-loans/understand/plans and leave us a comment if you do not understand your options. Choosing the right repayment plan is critically important. Be sure to click each plan and visit the link that lets you calculate your estimated loan payments.

The calculator for the Standard 10-Year repayment plan reveals that the minimum payment for our $15,000.00 loan at an 8.5% interest rate would be about $185.98 per month for ten years.

There are obviously a lot of things to take into account when choosing a repayment plan. If you can afford it, you should choose the standard plan, which will have your loans repaid in exactly ten years if you pay only the minimum monthly payment.

You will, of course, have to first create a budget to see what you can afford. More on this later.

Amortization:

When you make your monthly payment on the loan, the payment is first applied to the interest that has accrued on the loan for the month, and then what remains is applied to the principal. This explains why if you choose a plan with a lower minimum monthly payment than the standard plan, you will be paying more interest on your loan over the course of many more years. Because interest accrues no matter what, a lower monthly payment goes mostly to interest and barely makes a dent in the principal.

Take, for example, our $15,000.00 loan at an 8.5% interest rate repaid at the Standard Ten-Year plan. Using the payment estimator from http://studentaid.ed.gov/repay-loans/understand/plans for the standard plan, our minimum payment will be about $185.98 per month.

Using the formula provided before, we know that the interest due in the first month will be $106.25. Therefore, from our payment of $185.98, $106.25 goes to interest and only $79.73 gets paid to the principal, making the new principal balance $14,920.27.

In the second month, we recalculate the interest due using the new principal balance. This means that from our monthly payment of $185.98, $105.69 will now be paid to interest will be due and $80.29 will be paid the principal. The new principal will be $14,839.98.

This pattern continues for the life of the loan and can be summarized as follows: in the beginning of repayment, most of your payment goes toward interest and only some to principal. As time goes on, however, these amounts change as the principal becomes reduced—more of your monthly payment starts to go to principal instead of interest.

The full “amortization” schedule for our hypothetical loan is as follows:

This means that for our $15,000 loan at an 8.5% interest rate repaid over 10 years, we will owe $7,317.32 in interest.

Of course, it is entirely possible to get rid of your loans more quickly and pay less interest. Simply pay more than the minimum amount. For example, if we paid $50.00 more per month ($235.98), then that extra $50.00 will go directly to principal, causing the loan to be paid off in 7 years with only about $5,000.00 in interest.

Is paying more each month easier said than done? Not necessarily. More on this later.
However, understanding your amortization schedule for each loan you have is an absolutely necessity. Download the Free Gradvocates Amortization Chart to help you get started.

Capitalization of Interest:

The Federal Government pays the interest that accrues on subsidized loans while you are in school. But if you have unsubsidized loans, then interest will accrue during your time in school even though payment on that interest is deferred until after graduation. This means for our loan of $15,000.00 at 8.5%, if we go to school for three years and do not make interest payments during that time, $3,825.00 in interest will have accrued.

After graduation, you will likely receive one letter in the mail advising that you can pay the accrued interest if you want to avoid it from capitalizing. The letter will advise that this is not mandatory.

IMPORTANT: If you do not pay the interest at this point in time, it will be added to your principal. Therefore, your $15,000.00 loan will immediately become an $18,825.00 loan. In other words, once this unpaid interest capitalizes, you will be paying interest on your interest! This will increase your repayment period by several years.

This is why it is highly recommended to try to pay interest during your time in school or immediately thereafter before capitalization occurs.

Capitalization can also occur after periods of deferment, when your loan provider allows you to postpone payments. This means it is always better to switch your payment plan to income-based repayment, paying less per month than the Standard 10-Year Plan, instead of deferring, which lets interest accrue that is eventually capitalized into additional principal.

Creating a Budget

“Your economy, I suppose, begins now to be settled; your expenses are adjusted to your revenue, and all your people in their proper place. Resolve not to be poor: whatever you have, spend less. Poverty is a great enemy to human happiness; it certainly destroys liberty, and it makes some virtues impracticable, and others extremely difficult.”
—Samuel Johnson

Now that you know the basics, you need to develop a plan of attack. The first step is creating a budget.

Creating a budget is a pretty simple concept. First, begin with your take home income for the month (the amount you actually get after taxes). Then, make a list of all of your recurring expenses.

For example, let’s say you take home $4,000.00 per month and have the following fixed or non-discretionary expenses (expenses that you must pay no matter what):

• Rent: $1,000.00 per month
• Utilities (cable, electricity, gas): $230.00 per month
• Car Insurance: $70.00 per month
• Gym: $75.00 per month (this, along with your smart phone, is a fixed expense because you signed a contract)
• Smart Phone Service: $80.00 per month
• Food and Groceries: $200.00 per month
• Gasoline: $160.00 per month
• Student Loans: $950.00 per month (the sum of the minimum payments due on each loan)

This leaves you with $1,235.00 per month of discretionary income. You should now consider all of your non-essential expenses:

• Buying lunch each workday: $200.00 per month ($10 per meal, 5 meals a week, four weeks in a month)
• Going out to eat with your significant other once per week: $280.00 (four meals at $70.00 each)
• Going out with friends on the weekend: $200.00 per month ($50.00 per weekend)
• Going to the movies: $40.00 per month
• Coffee: $60.00 ($3.00 per weekday)

The remaining balance is $455.00, which will be subject to any unexpected expenditures, such as birthday presents, car repairs, medical expenses, traveling to see family, and shopping for clothing or other necessary household items.

Mapping out your expenses as we just did is an incredibly important part of paying off student loans. Clearly, this person’s budget is very wasteful and does nothing to get the individual out of debt.

Let’s see what we can cut and what consequences these cuts will have on repaying the student loans.

The True Cost of Your Smart Phone

“Right, my phone. When these things first appeared, they were so cool. Only when it was too late did people realize they are as cool as electronic tags on remand prisoners.”
—David Mitchell

Today, it seems as if everyone has a smart phone. Somehow Apple, Research in Motion (Blackberry), Google (Android), Verizon, and AT&T have convinced us that we need email and Internet at our fingertips, 24/7.

Unfortunately, unless the service is being provided by your employer, having a smart phone could cost you anywhere from $70.00 to $110.00 per month for the service alone. For purposes of this example, let’s say that it costs you $80.00 per month.

You might be thinking: “So what? $80.00 per month is only $960.00 per year. I can afford that.”

Well, let’s take our example of the $15,000.00 loan at 8.5% interest with a minimum monthly payment of $185.98. This will take 10 years to pay off and will cost you $7,317.32 in interest.

What if you took that $80.00 per month in smart-phone service and applied it to this student loan? The result would be significant. Instead of paying your loan off in 10 years, you would pay it off in 6. Instead of paying $7,317.32 in interest, you would pay $4,216.08.

So, in this scenario, your smart phone would be costing you $3,101.24 more in interest, and it would still cost you $9,600.00 ($80.00 per month for ten years) in service. Therefore, that smart phone would technically be costing you $12,701.24 over ten years.

If you want to pay down your loans more quickly, it is worth looking into more affordable cell-phone service. Before canceling your contract, make sure that it is cost effective to do so as your carrier will likely charge a termination fee. If it is not cost effective, then simply wait until your contract expires.

Please note that we are not advocating that you get rid of your smartphone altogether. You can still use your smartphone over Wi-Fi to check email, download apps, and surf the Internet.

There are also several services to help you make the transition:

• Park My Phone: http://www.parkmycellphone.com “park” your cell phone number here while making the transition and forward all your calls to another phone for only $3.00 per month.
• Skype: http://www.skype.com With a webcam and Internet access, you can video conference with friends and family for free.
• 3jam: http://3jam.com Route calls to phones or Skype; two-way SMS texts from mobile, web, or email; voicemail service
• Google Voice: https://www.google.com/voice This is a free virtual phone service, which includes calling and receiving text messages from your computer. There is even a Google Voice App for your smartphone (to use over wireless).

Reducing the Cost of Food

“Rather go to bed supperless, than rise in debt.”
—Benjamin Franklin

Look at the sample budget that we prepared above. Does that person really need to spend $200.00 per month on lunch? Of course not. This is a luxury that this person cannot afford.

The 4-Hour Body by Tim Ferriss is an incredible book about weight loss and exercise. One of the most interesting items in the book is a subsection titled $1.34 PER MEAL?, which shatters the common myth that eating healthy is expensive. By buying basic, health food items such as eggs, chicken breasts, beef, frozen vegetables, and canned beans, the author lost weight and reduced his food cost substantially.

By following these same principles and bringing lunch to work instead of buying it, any debtor can save a significant amount of money, which they can then put toward their student loans to get out of debt at an accelerated pace.

Can’t cook? Become proficient in just a few hours by reading The 4-Hour Chef.

The Cost of Your Gym

“Few people know how to take a walk. The qualifications are endurance, plain clothes, old shoes, an eye for nature, good humor, vast curiosity, good speech, good silence and nothing too much.”
—Emerson, Ralph Waldo

The person whose budget is listed above also pays $75.00 per month for a gym membership. The concept of health and fitness is incredibly important and this person should be commended for desiring to live a healthy lifestyle. However, it is entirely possible to eliminate that large monthly payment by exercising at home.

For cardio, the person could simply resort to running outside after reading this article for proper guidance: http://www.endurancewod.com/blog/1/post/25. He or she could also invest in a jump rope or exercise DVD.

For weightlifting, the person could invest in PowerBlock dumbbells, a weight bench, and a pull-up bar. This would, of course, require a small initial investment, which would pay for itself after about five or six months.

The Moral of the Story

The point of these budgeting examples is to show the consequences of living beyond your means or spending money on unnecessary things. Instead, strive to minimize these unnecessary expenses so you can reroute that money toward payments on the principal of your student loans.

Additional Tips for Paying Student Loans

Experiment with the Free Gradvocates Amortization Chart to Determine Which Loan You Should Target First

As a general rule, you should strive to pay off the loan with the highest interest rate first. However, every person’s situation is different. If you have a lower interest loan with only a little bit of principal remaining, it could benefit you to focus on paying that loan off in full so that can direct some of the minimum monthly payments toward other loans or other expenditures in your life.

The only way to figure out what is the best plan of attack is to do the math. Fortunately, we have provided you with a free chart to help you get started. Simply enter your remaining principal, interest rate, minimum monthly payment, and any extra monthly payments that you will make. The chart will automatically calculate your estimated amortization schedule.

Try adding extra payments and see what effect this has. You could easily reduce the lifespan of a loan by paying a little bit extra per month.

This chart is like no other because it will show you the exact moment that you will pay off each loan. Therefore, when one loan hits zero, you can add the payments from that loan to another loan in the “extra payment” column for an extremely accurate portrayal of the repayment of all your loans.

Download the free chart here: Free Gradvocates Amortization Chart

Ask Your Loan Provider to Break Your One Loan Group into Individual Loan Groups

You should also ask your loan provider to break your student loans into individual loans. The default setting is one big loan group, meaning that you do not get to control to which loans extra pay
ments will be applied.

Thinking about each loan by itself is critical to developing a plan of attack. Your massive amount of debt is not one big loan and should not be thought about as such. You can take action to pay the highest interest loans off and then apply those payments to other loans. Breaking your loan grouping into individual loans is the only way to accomplish this. By knocking over one domino, the rest will fall more quickly.

Use Mint.com to Track and Manage Your Finances

Mint.com is an incredible, free service that lets you track and manage your finances. Simply input all of your bank account, credit card, and student loan information into the secure server to get started. You can then view your accounts all in one place, see where you are spending most of your money, and monitor cash flow.

Using Mint.com will help you stick to your budget by providing you with alerts whenever you go over your allocations for each category. If you spend too much on fast food or get charged an ATM fee, Mint.com will call you out on it—every time.

Most importantly, Mint.com will warn you several days before your bills are due, meaning that you will never forget about a student loan payment, which is important for avoiding late fees and other penalties like capitalization of interest.

If Your Income Increases, Avoid Increasing Your Expenses

There may come a time when you are lucky enough to increase your income through a raise, new position with a higher salary, monetary gift, or side job. After receiving additional income, many people fall into the trap of increasing their spending: purchasing a new car, going out to eat more, or buying a new phone. Other people might use the increased money to justify current unnecessary expenses, such as the $80 to $120 paid per month on a smartphone contract.

Do not fall into this trap. Take caution from the numerous case studies involving people who won the lottery, increased their spending drastically, and eventually had to declare bankruptcy because they could not afford their new lifestyle.

It’s great that you increased your income, but you should continuously strive to eliminate unnecessary expenses. Devote that new income to paying off your student loans. This obviously does not sound as fun as buying the new iPhone; however, we guarantee that getting out of debt as quickly as possible will increase your quality of life more than any Apple product ever could.

Take our example of our student loan of $15,000.00 at 8.5% interest. The minimum payment is $185.98 under the ten-year repayment plan. Let’s say your salary increases by $5,000.00, which we will assume is approximately an extra $300.00 per month after taxes. If you put that extra $300.00 per month toward this student loan, then the loan will be paid off in full in just under three years. Instead of paying $7,317.32 in interest, you will pay approximately $1,986.26.

But best of all, by quickly paying down this loan, you will free up $185.98 of your income. So you would have effectively transformed your $300.00 per month raise into a $485.98 per month raise. You could then channel that extra $485.98 to other loans, creating a domino effect that quickly gets you out of debt.

Do Not Assume that Consolidation is the Best Option

Right now you likely have multiple student loans of varying principals interest rates. Consolidation, as the term suggests, takes all of your loans of varying principals and interest rates and merges it into one huge loan with a single interest rate.

We strongly urge you to do the math and research before you consolidate your loans. Don’t assume that this is something you should do because all of your friends have consolidated their loans. Once you consolidate, there is no going back. Get educated before resorting to this drastic remedy.

Advantages. You will make the physical act of repaying loans easier because you will repay one giant loan instead of having many individual loans, which could possibly have different payment due dates and be with multiple lenders. Also, you will extend your repayment term, which lowers your monthly payments. If you have any loans with variable interest rates, consolidation will give you a fixed interest rate. Depending on your situation, there could be more advantages, and we encourage you to research them.

Disadvantages. By consolidating your loans, you will be in debt longer and pay more interest. You will lose the ability to pay more money toward individual loans, which means you cannot employ the “domino” strategy of repaying your student loans to get out of debt as quickly as possible. As you recall, this method involves paying more toward high-interest loans to pay them off as quickly as possible, then diverting those payments toward the next high-interest loan, and repeating the process until all loans are paid off in full. By consolidating, you will have one huge loan that isn’t going anywhere for quite some time because you cannot use creative repayment methods.

Please weigh the pros and the cons and do the math. Consolidation calculators can be found at https://loanconsolidation.ed.gov/loancalc/servlet/common.mvc.Controller?controller_task=startCalculator and http://www.finaid.org/calculators/loanconsolidation.phtml. We see consolidation as a drastic remedy, which should be avoided at all costs if possible.

Be Wary of Student Loan Forgiveness

There are generally two ways to get your student loans forgiven: 1) certain public service employment for a period of ten years; and 2) faithfully paying your loans under the income-based repayment plan for a period of twenty-five years.

Let’s start with ten years of qualifying public service. Ten years of qualifying public service employment is a long time. These jobs are almost always low-paying and emotionally-taxing. It takes serious (and we mean SERIOUS) passion to work in that capacity for ten years.

Subtract ten from your current age and try to recall where you were in life. For many of you, this might be high school or college. Wasn’t that long ago? Haven’t you had a plethora of interesting experiences and life developments since then? Hasn’t your career path changed?

Now try to imagine the next ten years of your life. How old will you be? What do you want from life? What will make you happy? Do you want kids? Do you want to travel? Do you want to own a home?

To be eligible for public service student loan forgiveness, you generally must consolidate your loans and use the income-based repayment plan. Re-read the section on consolidation above. Once you consolidate, there is no going back.

Now let’s say that around your fifth year you can no longer deal with your emotionally-taxing public-service position or you decide that your low salary is not furthering your life goals. You switch to a non-qualifying position that pays twice your previous salary. However, because you were on the income-based repayment plan, you will not have made a single dent in the principal of your loans. Because you consolidated your loans, you cannot develop a plan of attack for repaying individual loans to get out of debt quickly.

And that is the danger of public service loan forgiveness—you can’t change your mind for ten years. You must earn a low salary for ten years. You must pay every month on your loans for ten years. Ten years is a long time. And what if the government, whether federal, state, or municipal, decreases the funding to your organization causing you to lose your job? What if your rent increases and you need more money? Things beyond your control can happen in those ten years.

Public-service work is not the “get-out-of-jail free” card as many believe. Unless you have a deep passion for public-service work, choosing this option can be extremely risky.

You can also be eligible for student-loan forgiveness if you faithfully make payments under the income-based repayment plan for twenty-five years. Please note that loan forgiveness under this option IS A TAXABLE EVENT. Let’s say that at the end of twenty-five years, you still have $100,000.00 worth of student loan debt. This will be forgiven; however, you will be taxed by the government as if you just received $100,000.00 of income. This is called “cancellation-of-debt income.” Horrible, right?

Don’t Overdo It

We advocate paying off your loans as best you can. However, it is important to leave enough money on which to live and survive. Otherwise, you will be defeating your purpose of getting out of debt by passively transferring your relatively modest interest rate student-loan debt to absurdly higher interest credit-card debt.

In other words, if you have no money, then you will be forced to use a credit card, which has an astronomically higher interest rate than your student loans.

We Need Your Input!

Do you have any tips or advice for paying off student loans? If so, we need your input. Please comment with your advice or tips, or share your own story about your student-loan experience. We will incorporate your advice into this article for others to see. Because Congress isn’t going to fix the student-loan crisis in our country any time soon, we must stick together.

If you learned something from this post, PLEASE share it with your friends on Facebook or Twitter!

Disclaimer: the contents of this post DO NOT constitute legal advice. If you suspect that you may have engaged in the unauthorized practice of law, you should immediately seek legal advice from an attorney in your state or jurisdiction.

A common misconception about getting into law school is that legal experience is required. It’s not. But many applicants, laboring under this misconception, tend to exaggerate their legal experience. This is a potentially dangerous idea as it could suggest that the applicant was engaged in the unauthorized practice of law.

What is the Unauthorized Practice of Law?

Although you may have learned quite a bit about the law in undergraduate classes or through work experience, you are not a lawyer until you are admitted to a state’s bar. This means that you should you not provide legal advice or perform legal work for anyone other than yourself.

As noted by a Harvard handbook:

As future practicing lawyers, law students have standards of professional behavior and responsibilities expected of them. Please be advised that every state, including the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, has statutes and rules that prohibit the “unauthorized practice of law.”

The practice of law is broadly defined and can include providing advice, in addition to direct representation. Just as one must get a license to practice medicine, one must be admitted to the bar in a particular state to be able to practice law. Law students are permitted to do legal work for clients as long as the student is working as an individual supervised by an attorney admitted to practice law in the relevant jurisdiction and that attorney takes responsibility for the legal work. Engaging in the unauthorized practice of law may result in criminal penalties, including fines and imprisonment.

To read the American Bar Association’s Model Rule of Professional Conduct prohibiting the unauthorized practice of law, which is adopted by many states, visit: Model Rule 5.5.

What this Means For You

So what does this mean for you and your personal statement? It simply means to be careful about what you write.

For example, it is not uncommon for someone to accompany a family member to court for moral support. Under no circumstances, however, should you write that you gave that person legal advice or appeared on their behalf.

Similarly, if you worked in any legal capacity, including as an intern, paralegal, or secretary for a law firm or state office, do not exaggerate your responsibilities. Do not make it seem as if you, without direct supervision, were representing clients or performing legal work. Do not say that you were “running” the office. You were not the lawyer.

Do not misinterpret this blog post as meaning that you cannot talk about your legal experience. If you have meaningful legal experience, then of course you should write about it. Just be mindful about what you write and how you write it.

Applying to law school can be an expensive proposition. This is why it is important to make sure that your law school application and supporting documents are perfect the first time around. If you have any doubts about your personal statement, resume, or any other document, please consider using our law school application editing services so that you do not have to incur additional fees when reapplying to law school.

LSAT: $160

The Law School Admission Test is required by almost every reputable law school. The LSAT consists of five 35-minute sections of multiple-choice questions. These sections include two logical reasoning sections, one logic games section, one reading comprehension section, and one experimental section.

Additional LSAT fees include late registration, changing your testing center, and handscoring. Fees also vary slightly for Canadian test takers.

If you want to simulate test day during every practice LSAT test, you should consider purchasing the SimuGator LSAT Proctor DVD from our sister company.

Credential Assembly Service: $155

LSAC’s Credential Assembly Service (CAS) is required or recommended by almost every law school.

This is an extremely helpful service that simplifies the application process. It allows you to submit your school transcripts and letters of recommendation directly to LSAC, which processes them into one comprehensive report that you can then submit to each law school. In other words, you submit documents to LSAC once instead of submitting them multiple times to each separate law school.

CAS has electronic versions of every law school application. It populates application fields with your name, address, and other information so you do not have to retype this redundant information. It also allows you to upload application documents for each law school, including your personal statement, resume, addenda, or any other document you need to submit.

Transcript Request: varies per institution

For each academic institution you have attended, you will need to have your transcript sent to LSAC’s CAS. This is usually a nominal fee for processing and mailing, but you should check with each University or institution for more information.

Law School Reports: $21 per school

CAS takes your transcripts, letters of recommendation, and LSAT score and generates a report that is submitted directly to each law school to which you apply. This, unfortunately, costs $21 for each law school. Therefore, if you apply to ten law schools, this will cost you $210.

Individual Law School Application Fees: $0 to $100 per school

In addition to law school reports, each law school may charge an application fee. The amount varies per school. Some applications may be free, and others might cost $70 or even $100.

Sometimes schools will contact you after receiving your LSAT score through LSAC’s Candidate Referral Service to offer you an application fee waiver. This is usually done to recruit competitive candidates. You may also receive a “hidden waiver,” which occurs when an application fee is waived, but you do not discover this until you are ready to submit your application. You can also contact each law school before you submit your application to ask whether they will grant you an application waiver based on your LSDAS GPA and LSAT score.

Getting an Offer of Admission: Priceless

There is no doubt that getting into law school is a difficult process. However, there is no greater feeling than being accepted and knowing that you are about to embark on a new and incredible journey towards the career of your dreams.

As you probably know, applying to law school is a competitive numbers game: LSAT score, GPA, class size, and number of applicants to name a few. This explains why most law school applicants cast a wide net by applying to several schools.

When applying to multiple schools, it can be tempting to try to finish the application as quickly as possible. This is especially true if the applicant has other obligations, such as classes or a job.

However, speeding through an application is not advisable. In particular, you should never skip the “Instructions” section of the application because it often contains requirements that are not specified in the remainder of the application.

For example, consider Boston College Law School’s application. The prompt, the part where you upload your personal statement, states the following:

Please provide us with a personal statement that demonstrates your interest and capacity for the study of law. In crafting your essay, you may wish to consider one or more of the following topics, or you may choose a topic of your own: a.) a major life experience that has shaped your world view; b.) significant coursework undertaken in college, and/or any professional experience; c.) unique personal characteristics or traits that you will bring to the BC Law community.

If you only read the prompt, then you would assume that Boston College Law School has no length or formatting requirements for their personal statement. This assumption would be incorrect because the instructions section requires the following:

We are interested particularly in learning about your motivation and preparation for the study of law as well as any circumstances that you believe relevant to the evaluation of your credentials. Your personal statement should be no more than two or three pages, double-spaced, with your name on each page.

As you can see, if you ignored the instructions section, then you would not have been informed that your personal statement needs to be 2-3 pages, double-spaced, and have your name on each page.

We know that completing multiple law school applications can be stressful, but we encourage you to slow down and pay attention to the details of every application. Doing so could be the difference between admission, admission with a scholarship, or rejection.

The fifty. You start your job search, spending countless hours locating and researching relevant positions. The forty. You discover a great job with a highly reputable organization. The thirty. You submit your resume and wait patiently for several days. The twenty. You are invited to come in for an interview. The ten yard line! You have an incredible interview and can really see yourself working for this organization. You decide that it is time for a touchdown dance and spike the ball with excitement. You are promptly tackled at the goal line. You did not get the job.

Just as a football player should not stop running with the ball until he scores a touchdown, you should not stop doing whatever it takes to get hired until you are actually hired. No early celebrations.

So what will take you from the ten-yard line into the end zone? The answer is simple: a well written, persuasive thank-you letter.

Why Is a Thank-You Letter Important?

A thank-you letter is highly important for the following reasons:

1. If well-written and sincere, it will show that you are extremely serious about the job.
2. It gives you one final chance to connect your strengths to the specific requirements of the position.
3. It makes you stand out from other candidates who have not sent a letter.
4. For competitive positions with longer decision times and a plethora of applicants, a strategically timed letter can renew the interviewer’s interest in you.

Accordingly, be sure to send a thank-you letter out to every interviewer that you meet with. Don’t throw away all of your hard work because of laziness or cockiness.

If you need help, we offer professional and affordable Thank-You Letter Editing.

Many employers now require cover letters and resumes to be submitted electronically. However, this presents an obvious problem: how do you sign your cover letter?

There are a few obvious but unacceptable solutions:

• Typing your signature with a cursive font like this: John Doe. This looks incredibly tacky and unprofessional.
• Typing /s/ then your name like this: /s/ John Doe. This is a better solution but tends to suggest that you did not have the time to actually sign the document. It is also not as sincere as an actual signature.
• Printing out the cover letter, signing it, and then scanning it back in. This wastes a ton of time, especially if you have a large number of applications to send out.

None of these are ideal.

The Ideal Solution: an Electronic Version of Your Handwritten Signature

The ideal solution is to create an electronic version of your handwritten signature. This is an incredibly easy process that we have reduced to five straightforward steps.

Here’s what you will need:

• Camera Phone
• Microsoft Paint
• Microsoft Word (this tutorial uses Word 2010)

Step One: Write Your Signature on a White Sheet of Paper

Sign your name in the middle of a regular sheet of white paper. You will achieve best results with a pen that produces thicker ink, such as a Sharpie pen.

Step Two: Take a Picture of Your Signature

Use your phone to take a picture of your signature. Try to get as close as possible, and find a position that does not cast a shadow on the sheet of paper. Note: if you have a scanner, you can just scan the paper in and skip some of the following steps.

You then need to get the photo from your phone to your computer. You can do this simply by emailing the photo to yourself, selecting “actual size” when prompted.

Step Three: Edit Your Photo in Microsoft Paint

Open your image in Microsoft paint by right clicking on the icon and selecting “Open With.”

After opening the photo, you will notice that it is huge and rotated on its side.

First, click the resize button as shown in the following photo. Then resize by percentage, reducing the size from 100% to 25% as shown.

After making the photo smaller, select the rotate button and choose “Rotate right 90 degrees” as shown.

Next, you will notice that the paper itself takes up most of your photo. Select only the signature area using the rectangular select tool. Then press the Crop button as shown.

After cropping the photo, save your photo as a JPEG image.

Step Four: Eliminate the Dark Background in Microsoft Word

Open up Microsoft Word. Under the Insert tab, select Picture and choose the edited photo that you saved from Microsoft Paint. This is what the image will look like. As you can see, we still have the dark background from the shadows on the paper itself.

To remove the dark background area, click on the Photo and then select the Corrections menu. Select the option with the whitest background, as shown below.

Next, select the photo and open the Artistic Effects menu. Select the option that has the whitest background as shown.

Note: if these two steps do not completely remove the background, then click on the Corrections menu and then choose Picture Corrections Options. Play with the brightness and contrast sliders until the background is completely white.

The end result is shown in the picture below. Right click on it and choose Save as Picture.

When saving your signature, make sure it is in JPEG format as shown below.

The final result will be a signature image as shown below.

Step Five: Insert Your Final Signature Into Microsoft Word Whenever You Need to Sign Anything!

After importing your signature into your cover letter, resize it so it is smaller and matches the rest of the text. Here is the end result.

You can now import your signature into any document that you need to sign. Please comment if you have any questions. Good luck!