<p>To be looking at this site now actually puts you ahead of the curve. Most kids/families we know didn’t start really focusing on search until senior year – too late in many cases.
I just found this site just a couple of months ago and am very grateful. We were one of those families that other posters are warning you about. We didn’t run our EFC calculation, figure out what we could pay or how much we might need to borrow before our son started applying for colleges. By the time we did figure it out, our kid – a current senior – had fallen in love with some expensive LACs when we should have been focusing on state schools and their deadlines in order to get some out-of-state reciprocity money. Thanks to some suggestions here at seriously the very last minute until deadlines (and in some cases, after the deadlines), we are still hoping for the best come financial-decision time.
If I could turn back the clock, we would have done this totally differently – starting by looking at money and what loan debt we might be facing.</p>