@GGNewton: If the SSS indicates to Choate that you could be full pay, you will be expected to be full pay all the years your child attends. We absolutely did not think we could swing it (we thought we needed $15-20K), but the SSS thought otherwise. Choate notified us prior to M10 that if we could find a way to be full pay (and they suggested ways, including loans, which we weren’t willing to take out), they would admit our son. If not, they would send the rejection letter indicating that they were unable to meet our financial need.
You can do some research here and find many threads on this dilemma. We had less than 48 hours to make this decision, and it was agony. Obviously, we decided to bite the bullet, but it meant close to “rice and beans” for four years. We are not poor (and never claimed to be), but we did not think the school would require every penny of our disposable income and no further contributions to our retirement or any other savings plans during those years. We had sizable 401Ks and significant equity in our home, neither of which we were willing to tap for high school. We knew we’d have to stop 529 contributions, but we did not have any type of memberships or any other optional cash flow commitments to redirect to BS. (We did not have cable, our companies paid our phones, and we had no car payments. Selling either of our very old cars would not have made a dent.) We just stopped retirement contributions and hunkered down for four years. Many here have similar stories, and each family facing this hard decision needs to determine what is right for them; there is no one-size answer.
Of course, no one should feel sorry for anyone in this position. If you can somehow scrape together $50-60K+ to send your kid to a boarding school, you are not exactly hurting. We feel no resentment. We just didn’t fully understand at the time the level of financial sacrifice we’d have to make and that the boarding schools would expect. For example, they will impute an available financial contribution from a non-working spouse, and they will consider home equity. We were both working, and Choate did not expect us to tap into current retirement savings, but if we’d been willing to tap our home equity and/or take out loans, those four years would not have been so tight. It was our decision not to incur debt for high school, so how we lived those four years was entirely our choice. If we’d had other kids who would have been affected, we may have made a different choice. Everyone has different parameters to consider. If you are fortunate enough to face this dilemma around M10, come back to the board, and we’ll commiserate with you then. Good luck!