Ideas for paying for CCIE Study Material

egrizzly

Hello all,

What are some ideas you all have about paying for the CCIE study material which cost like $1,400 or $1500 at two of the major vendors. So far I spoke to one of them and they agreed to break it up into a 4-month payment plan. However this is still too expensive especially for people paying a car note as well as rent, e.t.c

eGrizzly

TechGuru80

There are $499 bundles...sure they are more basic but they could at least get you going. It looks like it only is missing Lab Preparation videos and you get less tokens. When needed you could purchase the Lab Prep separate for another $499.

CCIE Routing & Switching Cisco Certification Training - INE

Or CBT Nuggets and pay $99 / month for stream access.

silalaval

I bought the books first and will take a couple of months to read them.. If you plan your study path in advance, you can make some savings and invest then on the more expensive study materials at a later stage.
I have budgeted £150 each month for training (for stuff like books, INE workbooks, switches, maybe bootcamp,etc).

Consider this an investment... remember that if you achieve this, you will get a job with a better pay a your investment will be re-paid in a few months.

fredrikjj

I lucked out and managed to buy INE's RS Workbook when buying v4 volume 1 meant automatic upgrade to the full v5 workbook. That turned a $499 purchase into $199. There was also a Christmas sale where you could have gotten 50% off any workbook which means that you technically could have gotten any v4 book for $99 (later upgraded to v5 for free), but I missed that one.

So in short, wait for a deal. INE and other training vendors know that they have customers with completely different price elasticities. A big company is probably not going to care that a workbook is $499 or $199, but an individual customer does, and that's why they send the deals directly to your email address. Ideally they would probably want to price discriminate more accurately than that, but that's kind of difficult.

With enough effort put in, the workbook, textbooks (safari online subscription) and cisco docs (free) is probably all you need. I could be wrong, but videos and bootcamps and all that, while nice, does not seem essential.

That lab itself seems like the biggest financial problem considering that you can't really assume that you'll pass on try 1. Unless you have a high paying job already, paying for 3 or 4 lab fees seems a bit challenging, both financially and psychologically.

Dieg0M

Budget yourself. Studying for the CCIE is expensive. I have dropped over 10k in study material/exam fee's this year for the CCIE. Honestly, the CCIE is not an entry level position and as a Network Engineer you should make enough money to pay for these fee's.

egrizzly

wow, all great tips. thanks y'all. I'm gonna find an angle to finance this journey for sure.

Soulreaver

For similar reasons as yourself, i have been going the buy as i need + waiting for sales. i save around 100-150 per month and i use that to purchase training.

i have been buying materials from both ipexpert and ine and so far i can tell you.

I prefer INE videos + IPexpert workbooks. INE's workbook is ok but i prefer the more structured approach IPexpert has this tech lab can be done in 2hrs etc

MrBishop

INE offers a free trial membership that allows you to view the entire NEW CCIE series for a period of time. I'm not sure if this promotion is still running but you might want to check this out. Members can cancel within the trial period and not be changed any fee.

FloOz

Buy things piece by piece and as you need them. I have seen people make the mistake of buying all the CCIE reading material and not even touching 4 of the books in the first 6 months. You can also try speaking with one of the training vendors to see if you can get on longer term payment plan.

Alex90

INE do a payment plan so you can spread the cost over 4 - 8 months. The more you spend with them, the longer the period you can spread your repayments over.

They don't charge you any interest on top of the base price either so it's a pretty good deal. And to that the fact the 2 year subscription has $500 off it at the moment.