<p>@AnnieBeats </p>
<p>Okay…Had you not said anything to @ucbalumnus, we would have been none the wiser. </p>
<p>@AnnieBeats </p>
<p>We fit the profile that you describe. It is not from poor financial planning, but it is from very deliberate choices. We are a single income family. I homeschool our kids. We have a very large family by today’s standards, 8 kids from ages 25 down to 4. Those are very personal decisions and ones we very happy with.</p>
<p>Funding our kids’ college is way down on our list of parental decisions. We support them the best we are able based on our familial financial circumstances at any given time. They know from the time they are very little that we are a family and we function as a family and that decisions impact everyone. We all make sacrifices to help each child achieve their individual goals and aspirations at all ages. We have funded summer programs like SSP, dual enrollment at universities, online classes or private tutors (Russian for example) But paying for a high cost college education is not something that any of our kids has ever expected, nor will they ever be provided b/c it is outside of our financial means. (Not many people in our income bracket can fund $800,000+ in college expenses and that is what our lowest EFC has ever been calculated to be if you multiply it by 4 and then by 8.)</p>
<p>We don’t live in a fancy house, we drive older cars, we do day trips and do not go on family vacations. We don’t have iphones, etc. The younger kids wear hand-me downs. There really isn’t any surplus area we can cut. </p>
<p>And you know what…we are all very happy. We have a great family. I love each and everyone of our kids. They are all pretty amazing people. I have no “jealousy” that there are families that can send their kids to HYP etc. I would not trade anything about our life at all to simply have more $$ to provide more for fewer children, and living in reality, that is what it would take. Providing for a family the size of ours, even on a really great income, is not easy.</p>
<p>The world would be a poorer place if everyone had to function lock step with a certain set of priorities. And it is also very naive to think income bracket defines quality of life. I am sure that there are families that make much less than my dh that have a much higher standard of living. I am sure there are people that make far more that have made really poor decisions or made poor investments or even had uncontrollable tragedies (thinking about the families recently in the Pensacola area who had homes destroyed by flood waters in areas that have never flooded before. Homes were lost and they had no flood insurance.) Or people who may have what appears to be a high income now, but it is a recent thing and 15 yrs of their child’s life that isn’t what their incomes were. </p>
<p>And, thankfully, our reality is not reflected by the conventional wisdom in regards to school rankings. And our kids are also aware that there is a world of employment opportunities beyond 4 yr degrees. Our oldest is a chemE who attend a small state tech university. He graduated in 2011 and makes significantly more than the avg. quoted chemE salary. And he did it w/zero debt, for him or us. Our ds who will be attending college in the fall will be going on total scholarship. His younger siblings will either have to attend the local university or earn merit scholarships to go elsewhere or make the decision their older sister did. She is finishing her OTA degree which we were able to pay out of pocket. She is a completely avg student and OTA fits both her abilities and her personality. </p>
<p>So while it would be nice if there were scholarship programs that gifted students like our rising freshman could apply for that didn’t depend on parental income, the lack of them does not mean that kids who fall in the financial “void” cannot succeed and do exceedingly well. There are lots of opportunities out there. They just may not be the ones they want. Great opportunities are what you make them.</p>
<p>@Mom2aphysicsgeek Do you think there should be scholarship programs for families similar to you? Thank you for sharing your story.</p>
<p>Should? Loaded word from my perspective, so the answer would have to be a definitive no.</p>
<p>Could some philanthropist offer a program like that if they wanted to? Sure. It would be great. </p>
<p>@Mom2aphysicsgeek:</p>
<p>That is the beauty of the American system. Unlike in some other countries, where where you go to undergrad can have a big impact on how successful you are in life (and that is often determined by some test taken at 18), there are many paths to success in the US.</p>
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<p>@AnnieBeats - I know you didn’t ask me but since we’re also in the category of folks who don’t qualify for financial aid, I thought I’d answer. It would be nice, but I would imagine the competition would be so fierce for them, that it would be even harder to win one of them than it is to win the lottery. It’s hard enough to win a full scholarship at a school like Vanderbilt, without having to compete against kids who don’t even want to go that particular school - an open scholarship would be much more competitive. </p>
<p>What I do wish is that elite colleges did not force full pays to pay for financial aid. Duke estimates about 25 grand of tuition goes toward financial aid. I don’t what it is for other schools, but it’s probably similar. Those schools have made their choice and still people are lined up waiting to get in. Just not my kids. My own alma mater does not give merit scholarships and every few months some poor work study kid will call and ask me for a donation to help other kids attend the school. Each time I politely tell them that I can’t afford to send my own daughter there, so I don’t really feel right about helping to pay for other people’s children to do so. Each time the work study kid tells me they hear that a lot from alumni with college aged kids. </p>
<p>@halfemptypockets
You’re right about the competition. I can’t even imagine. There are a lot of extremely talented kids out there who fall squarely where our kids do. The competition for the few scholarships offered institutionally is fierce. There just wouldn’t be enough to go around to put even a dent in the “extremely well qualified but can’t pay” pool.</p>
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<p>Most Stamps Scholarships have no need component, but some do, such as Cal Tech.</p>
<p>Halfempty, both my husband and I had health insurance through our employers, and our kids were insured through them as well. We paid 30% of the premiums…employers paid the rest. Add $600 to my house bill for property taxes. </p>
<p>I hate to remind you of this…but we would have health insurance, home and car insurance, and property taxes, as well as utilities whether our kids went to college…or not. And as I said in my earlier post…those costs were covered by my husband’s income…mine paid for college.</p>
<p>We have insurance on our home and our cars with a much higher liability limit than required by our state. We also carry collision on our cars.</p>
<p>Yes, we continued to make maximum contributions to our retirement accounts…but those also reduced our taxable income.</p>
<p>Things we never did…and still don’t do…we don’t shop at places like Whole Foods. Ever hear of Aldi? Check it out. While the kids were in college…no vacations except to drive to see friends or relatives. No new cars. Limited discretionary spending. No smart phones/data plans. No cable TV. </p>
<p>The biggest thing we did was PLAN ahead. We made sure our mortgage payment was as low as it could be for those 7 years of college bills. We made sure we did NOT have any car payments or balances on credit cards. </p>
<p>And yes…having $1600 in mortgage/property tax a month was a HUGE help. But we planned that out. </p>
<p>I think merit scholarships for middle income kids would be great. I have to take exception to the some of the assumptions being made in this thread. We are a high income family, we could never qualify for federal aid. We make great money now, but we havent always had that income. I think folks hear, for example, you make insert___6 figure salary, you shouldnt have any problems paying for college. Well if you have been making that type of money for many years, I would agree. In our case, our income really just hit that over the last 4 years, so on paper , yes, it looks like we should have fully funded 529’s etc, but thats just not the case.</p>
<p>We also didn’t have higher earnings for many years before our kids went to college. I think this actually helped us when college came. We weren’t used to living on higher incomes. So, we were able to continue to fund our living expenses on the lesser amount, and use the new higher income extra money to find college costs. And as I mentioned earlier, we didn’t have a penny in college savings. </p>
<p>There are merit scholarships offered by many colleges for high achieving applicants. These do not take need into account.</p>
<p>There are not (except for Posse, it seems) outside scholarships that are merit based with out a need component. </p>
<p>Oh, that reminds, me: A few of the Ivy-equivalents do offer merit full-rides. Duke offers 60. CalTech offers 2-3. JHU offers a handful as well. So does WashU. A little below, Vandy, Emory, UVa, Wake, UNC, and USC also offer them. Obviously, they’re insanely difficult to get. I imagine that a national merit competition wouldn’t be any easier. Unless you’re hung up on the IVY LEAGUE label, you might as well try for them if you think your kid is good enough. Finally, Chicago, CMU, and Rice offer merit aid to some students (though they tend to be more like 1/4th tuition or something like that, though a few of Rice’s could be full-tuition/full-ride). A little lower, Case Western, Miami, and Tulane offer them to many more (Miami has some full-rides and Tulane has a decent number of full-rides).</p>
<p>@halfemptypockets:</p>
<p>“What I do wish is that elite colleges did not force full pays to pay for financial aid. Duke estimates about 25 grand of tuition goes toward financial aid.”</p>
<p>You do realize that that’s all semantics, don’t you? They could say that all tuition goes towards paying professors (tuition and fees are 16% of income while salaries and wages are 48% of payments) with all financial aid coming from endowment income without changing a single penny anywhere.</p>
<p>In any case, I assume that you didn’t go to college on financial aid.</p>
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<p>A car where heated seats and sunroof options cost $10,000 is probably an expensive car to begin with. On a lower priced car, those options are probably around $1,100 for both.</p>
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<p>Since you seem to want to bring the non-specific reference to the forefront, here is the post in question:</p>
<p><a href=“Is private school worth it? - Parents Forum - College Confidential Forums”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/1654617-is-private-school-worth-it-p1.html</a></p>
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<p>However, you are not the only poster on these forums who has a similar situation of high income with high spending habits that consume all of that high income.</p>
<p>Maybe she should have asked hubby’s family to pay for the house and cars as well.</p>
<p>@UCBalumnus:</p>
<p>It’s a freakin’ Subaru Forester. I don’t know what other amenities she had added (these are usually part of packages), but the total extra was $10K.</p>
<p>It appears that the cheapest base model Subaru Forester is $23,045 at MSRP. But a loaded up one is $35,821 at MSRP (but the difference is a lot more than heated seats and sunroof).</p>
<p>@PurpleTitan
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<p>The colleges actually call it a **“high tuition/ high aid” **model, so HalfEmpty is correct in his assessment of how colleges deliberately raise the cost of tuition to force fullpays to shoulder the cost of FA. </p>
<p>I can probably afford the $60k fullpay cost of private school for my kid, but I refuse to pay it-- the cost is just TOTALLY RIDICULOUS. There are many high quality schools that offer merit scholarships; therefore, what rational reason is there to pursue schools that don’t offer merit money? I’m not convinced that the job/gradschool opportunities are better for Georgetown grads (no merit aid) than for GWU grads (merit aid).</p>
<p>I lump those no merit aid schools together w ridiculously overpriced Hermes handbags, Rolex wristwatches & Montblanc fountain pens. Now that I think of it, I know people (the secretaries in my office) who spend a month or more of income or go deeply into credit card debt to buy those designer handbags/watches/etc. Nuts…</p>
<p>Whoops! Duplicate post I can’t delete.</p>
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<p>I don’t understand your point here? </p>
<p>Your total mortgage is about what mine is. I don’t know many people in the Philadelphia area with a monthly housing payment under 2k and I feel very fortunate to count ourselves among them. The safer neighborhoods get reamed by taxes. Even 3 bedroom apartments in safe (not necessarily nice) neighborhoods cost about what you and I are paying for monthly housing. I’ve always considered it good financial planning (mixed with an attitude of inertia that doesn’t compel us to move up) along with a bit of luck to have bought at the right time that we’re able to have that kind of monthly housing cost. Also, I haven’t had a car payment in more than 2 decades. </p>
<p>I do wonder though, if you had been on the hook for your entire health plan, if you think you’d have been able to afford BU without parental loans. If you were shopping at Aldi (and I assume thrift shops and yard sales on those rare occasions you needed to purchase a non food item), it doesn’t seem you had much fat to cut from the budget. How would you have come up with another 8k to 10k per year? How about dental and/or orthodontics? Did your employer assist you with those payments too? There are lots of families in that 140k range who simply could not make a 35k annual payment (or 30k if their kid was taking on loans) without additional borrowing. And it doesn’t mean they’re shopping at Whole Foods. </p>
<p>Of course I’m familiar with Aldi! I’m a penny pincher. I know exactly where the fat in our budget is. And as I said above, yes, there are adjustments that we could make to our lifestyle that would amount to maybe 1k per month. But the discretionary spending that takes the biggest bites are retirement and insurance (health, car, home, and life) - none of which are mandatory and none of which we’re willing to reduce. </p>