<p>I have a meeting scheduled with a financial advisor on April 23rd. But they won’t answer the question about how to decide which schools I should plan on funding. Once I decide how much I want to save up, they will help me with that. I’m trying to figure out what schools I want to save for, and then in turn I can have a number that I can discuss with them. The answer is I want to set aside enough funding for 75% of the college education costs at the in state university.</p>
<p>It is amazing what our pre-conceived notions are of a good career for an unborn child.</p>
<p>Plumbers are great (they earn big bucks and are necessary for a flushing toilet) while truck drivers are not so great (fill in your favorite redneck joke here). I’d rather have someone who can manuver a large vehicle in tight spaces driving a truck than fixing the leak under my kitchen sink. </p>
<p>If a kid has a talent for something valuable to society and genuinely enjoys contributing in that manner (rather than it just being a paycheck), I’m happy to support him/her in doing it. While we’d all rather have our kids grow up to be doctors and lawyers (well, maybe not lawyers), please realize that we’ve been socialized to put those professions on a pedastol. I groan every time I see kids on this site thinking about med school because of the paycheck they can collect as X specialist (trashing the idea that a family practioner is a worthwhile endeavor because you can’t afford a BMW while paying off your 6-figure loans treating sore throats).</p>
<p>What I am saying here is encourage your child to appreciate the contributions of all members of society and be supportive of how s/he wishes to contribute to the world when s/he grows up.</p>
<p>Of course I’ll support my kid for whatever legal endevours they choose to go on. </p>
<p>But that doesn’t obligate me to pay for truck driving school.</p>
<p>And that’s not really the point of this thread. I’m not looking to argue on trade school vs college. We need plumbers, truck drivers, hair stylists, etc. And it’s fine if my kids grow up and become them.</p>
<p>I might suggest the purchase of a Cremonese stringed instrument of documented lineage as an investment vehicle.</p>
<p>Realizing fully that your own progeny will never have the joy of playing it at it’s potential, these quite worthless pieces of wood made by lowly artisans now long deceased tend to increase exponentially in value.</p>
<p>These tend to be far safer investment vehicles than the stock or bond markets, as the recent economic meltdown might suggest.</p>
<p>Resale is fairly easy, and there is a willing market for purchase. </p>
<p>I do want to warn you that these may well be re-purchased by philanthropic foundations or misguided individuals that actually put these in the hands of promising (but marginally employed and often emaciated) musicians who only serve to follow their Muse.</p>
<p>I do realize that this investment strategy may present philosophical issues in your case.</p>
<p>We took the “shoot-for-the-Moon” program. If we made it And DS deserved it, he got it. </p>
<p>If we missed the moon shot, we can say at least we tried and DS got a paid education at a public. We had a perfect alignment launch (1985) and trajectory until 2000 (dot.com crash) where we made small corrections but a major failure in 2002 (9/11, 2002-2005) which we had to make extensive and critical corrections on the entry phase (incollege). We did make a successful landing with all systems intact (2006). Offspring relaunched for grad school with onboard and supplemental fuel (scholarships) from the grad school. DS then made some asteroid sojourns and has landed near home base with much improved experience, hardware and software. </p>
<p>The onboard pilot did exceptionally well and improved his skills overtime. The homebased, ground control are completely spent. It was a very near thing and doubt that we could ever replicate the same.</p>
<p>Lots of things can happen in 18 years. The US higher education system may change drastically, otherwise you may look at $100k per year Cost of Attendance at a lot of private colleges; the public universities may suffer from deep budget cuts. Your child may or may not have developmental issues–my very bright nephew has ADD and borderline Asperger’s, which led his parents to think about his college education with very different criteria from ours. The children of two profs I know dropped out of college after their freshman year. You may suffer economic reversals; you may move to a state where the flagship university does not offer the kind of education you child wants. And so on, so forth.
Here are a few CC aphorisms: “love the kid on the couch” (from Blossom). Your kid is not even on the couch, yet!
“The best laid plans of mice and men oft gang agley” (from Robbie Burns).
The standard advice is to secure your retirement and save as much as is feasible for your child’s (or children’s) higher education. Enjoy parenthood!</p>
<p>And I know someone who got a B.A. from Harvard and decided to become a carpenter! He did quite well. I saw a wonderful Shaker-style bureau he made for his brother. I could not have afforded his prices!:)</p>
<p>The old saw, “The journey not the arrival matters,” has some truth to it, and “No gets to take his/her toys when s/he dies.” So if we don’t enjoy the ride, our destination is the same no matter how many goodies we accrue along the way.</p>
<p>I understand the idea of being outcome and not experience oriented, but I think a mixture of the two is the most successful life plan. No, we do not want to fund a lifetime of navel watching, but I <em>would</em> fund a philosophy degree as long as my kid knew that s/he would eventually have to earn a living. Oh yeah, that’s another thread.</p>
<p>My wife had everything planned out before our first child was born, too. The plan even stayed intact for a couple of weeks after her birth!</p>
<p>Seriously, talking about funding post-secondary education with a prospective parent is like talking about sexual morality with a 10-year-old. Save what you can and deal with your actual children as they grow. You will have plenty of time to think about horizontal equity, and whether there are types of education you won’t fund. The likelihood that your Caltech-eligible child demands to go to truck-driving school is negligible, but it’s all too easy to imagine circumstances in which you would be more than enthusiastic about truck-driving training (assuming there are still trucks and all).</p>
<p>I think it is great to save and plan ahead. BUT, we have probably spent more money on family vacations than we should have. When we added up all the money we spent on vacations we probably could have funded couple more college tuitions. Now both girls are almost out of the house (2 more years), what we have are some wonderful memories we’ve had as a family. I would say to OP - it’s great you are planning ahead, but don’t worry about it so much that you forget to enjoy what’s along the way.</p>
<p>Please don’t tell your child anything before high school and serious financial calculations. Costs of college and EFC can change drastically. I remember my father telling me in middle school that if I could get into an Ivy he would pay for it. At the beginning of senior year we were arguing constantly because of the catch-22 where my parents would let me apply to Brown (so that I couldn’t say they never gave me the oppuritunity), but if I attended I would be nearly 100k in debt. It caused a lot of unnecessary tension and is no one’s fault. It’s just that no one knew about cost or where they would be. One of my good friends got into RISD, Skidmore, and a lot of other great art schools but so far can’t afford any except a state school because she didn’t realize how different her EFC and the amount her parents could actually pay were. If she had, she could have applied for more scholarships earlier.</p>
<p>Once I finally figured out the money situation (after all of the silly high school ideas about Wesleyan, Brown, UChicago, and other schools which don’t give nearly enough merit aid to be viable options), I applied only to safeties and a few targets for scholarships. That worked out and luckily I can afford some schools I like without loans. However, I still don’t understand how my older sister got a scholarship worth much less than one of mine and gets out loan-free (in fact, to pay the difference my father almost took money he had saved for me to give to her as well…I’m very grateful that he eventually changed his mind), while I have a 2/3 tuition scholarship and am told I won’t have much of any money left over if I take it…regardless of my technically saving 40k more over the years. It gets to the point where I’m terrified not to have money left over because I’m convinced my EFC or some other unforeseen complication will make postgraduate education impossible to afford. I need to do more research on that part, though.</p>
<p>The idea of giving more money to a child with more “academic potential” is unfair to me, as is funding the older siblings more and worrying about younger ones later. However, a lot of others will disagree with that and I think in the end you need to figure out your own path as a family. </p>
<p>Just please don’t give your child any false expectations or even talk about college with them when they’re young. If you let them down, they’ll stop appreciating the amount you ARE funding. My best friend has a EFC < 10k and his parents aren’t funding any of his college, plus only one school he applied to met his calculated need. The rest just gave him loans. I can only imagine how much he’d appreciate what my parents have done for me, something I should appreciate far far more every day than I do. It doesn’t cross your mind when you’re thinking about all the other things you can’t have. So try to help them appreciate what you are giving them by not telling them about MIT and Stanford. Just let them grow and develop into a great person and worry about saving money for college period.</p>