<p>I read the advice here to have conversations about money with your kid, and to have them early so that students know what to expect. This sounds good to me, but I'm wondering what people say? Let's assume that, without taking on debt, I can contribute $X amount of money per year to my child's education.</p>
<p>Did you say </p>
<p>"You can choose anything under $X a year". (Or $Y, being $X + Staffords + a reasonable amount for a student to earn)</p>
<p>"You have $4X to spend, if you choose a less expensive school you'll have the rest for grad school, study abroad, or a new car"</p>
<p>"$X is my limit, but if a less expensive option is available, I reserve the right to make you take it."</p>
<p>With the older one, who had money from her paternal grandmother, it was roughly your second option: "
“You have $4X to spend, if you choose a less expensive school you’ll have the rest for grad school, study abroad, or a new car”"</p>
<p>Older D knew that for certain schools she would need merit aid, grants, etc. She chose one her trust would cover. My S chose technical school, which was also covered.</p>
<p>My younger D’s dad and I do not have a trust fund to cover her education, but she is a far better student and is considering colleges which offer full pay or huge merit scholarships for decent grades. She knows what we’ll be able to cover if she looks elsewhere.</p>
<p>We told our kids we would pay the equivalent of the cost of our instate flagship, and anything above that would be their responsibility. Both kids were awarded scholarships that brought their net cost way below our projection. We were lucky.</p>
<p>We told our oldest D the cost had to be similar or below that of the in-state flagship sticker price AND that there had to be a compelling reason to spend that amount of money somewhere else, as our flagship has a good reputation overall. She received a big enough scholarship to bring the cost of the OOS to that level. Though she had a good scholarship at the in-state public, the program at the OOS is so much stronger we felt it met our “compelling reason” standard.</p>
<p>We told our kids:</p>
<p>We don’t pay for college or weddings. We will HELP, but we will not take out personal loans, and we will not pay the way. That means that you have to work very hard, make good grades, do volunteer work, get a job - and these are all things that we will require anyway. Hopefully you will pull some scholarships, save your money (from Junior and Senior years and summers), land the interest free loan we found for you and be able to make up the rest in government loans. Most likely you will attend a public college, so we suggest you focus your efforts in those areas. </p>
<p>If you’ve worked hard, pulled scholarships, saved your money, landed your interest free loan (which we DO cosign for) and taken the government loans (which we do NOT cosign for - no Parent Plus), and you’ve done your part, we will help with what’s left over for a public in-state college.</p>
<p>And will continue that way from year to year as long as the grades stay up.</p>
<p>If you said to your kid “We’ll pay X” and they got an offer at a lower price to another school, would you make them take it?</p>
<p>Curious Jane - no. If I tell my kids, “I’ll pay X”, then I’ll pay X.</p>
<p>We said, “We have X to spend on college. If you want to go somewhere more expensive than that you need to make it up with scholarships as we will not sign off on you going into debt. If you spend less than X, we’ll help with grad school.”</p>
<p>The truth is that the bulk of their loans comes from an interest free loan. I pay for that while they’re in school. It is also my plan to continue to pay for that until it’s paid off - but I haven’t told them that. :)</p>
<p>Graduation or wedding gift.</p>
<p>We didn’t have a set amount. We do have a 529-type plan for both kids, and they knew its value, plus some other money to which we had access. The conversation kind of went like, “You’ll need a lot of merit and FA to attend the kinds of schools you’re looking at. I’ll help you come up with a list of schools that you want to attend and have favorable financial aid policies that we hope can make that happen.”</p>
<p>And then we made a list of some schools that we knew met 100% of financial need (even if their idea of need doesn’t match ours), some that didn’t but offered good merit aid (we could see later if it was enough) and then one or two state publics.</p>
<p>We’re in the throes of looking at FA packages for the second one. The school he most wants to attend is not the cheapest. One school he’d graduate debt-free. It’s a great school. The one he really wants is still doable, but he’ll graduate with minimal debt. I mention this because, for us, how much to spend is variable. Is one school “worth” the debt as opposed to another? In our minds, yes, so I’m glad we didn’t set a hard number. </p>
<p>In your case, I don’t see anything wrong with saying, “We have $x amount to spend per year. If you want to go to a school that’s more expensive, you’ll need to get merit or FA to make up the difference, or outside scholarships. That said, choosing a college is part science (the hard money numbers) and part art (Are opportunities better at this school over another? Graduation rates? etc). Let’s make a list where we think we’ll be close to that $x number and then see what happens when it comes time to pick.”</p>
<p>The one thing I’ve seen happen on cc with giving a hard number is that when options come in, parents balk at spending that stated number because the kids got a “better offer.” I think it’s wrong to tell a kid you’ll spend $30K per year and then change your mind and say “I’ll only spend $10K because you got into this less expensive school.” I understand the whole “I’m paying so I have a say” argument. But if you weren’t SURE you were willing to pay $30K a year, why did you say you were???</p>
<p>Good luck!</p>
<p>ETA: It took me so long to write this post (doing other things at the same time), I see OP asked the very question I addressed in the last paragraph. Great minds think alike! If you aren’t positive you’re willing to pay X amount, then don’t say you are!</p>
<p>We told the kids we had enough to pay for our in-state flagship, which is pretty hefty budget as most of the Big 10 unis are not inexpensive.</p>
<p>I would hope, when options come in, that if a much better financial option came up, my kids would consider it heavily at least. I know mine would - I don’t know about others.</p>
<p>But again, if I said I would pay X, then I would pay X.</p>
<p>That’s one of the reasons we don’t say we’ll pay X. LOL.</p>
<p>It’s their money. Any money saved is THEIR money. So they tend to weigh cost pretty heavily.</p>
<p>We said that our budget is up to 30,000 but anything above state school price (over 20,000) will require you to take out a student loan.
He is certain he wants to go to grad. school so anything left will be for that.</p>
<p>We have asked that he apply to more than his favorite so we can compare packages.</p>
<p>S has a decent savings account so all spending money will be on him. (just like now)</p>
<p>We told each kid we would pay the FAFSA EFC .
( which was very different for each)</p>
<p>We told our kids “this” is how much we will pay each year, you have to figure out how to come up with the rest. When the numbers were all in, they had several choices within that range. D picked the least expensive option on the table, S is waffling between two still but I’m guessing it will be his second least expensive option.</p>
<p>We didn’t have a set amount. Instead we helped him create a list which we knew with our EFC and merit aid would be doable. We also insisted he apply to at least one state school. Then we would see were the dust settled. The big unknown was his reach school - a need only school - but we weren’t too concerned since we thought he hadn’t a pray of getting in. We were wrong on that but fortunately, in the end, that was the best package he got. If it hadn’t he had 8 other schools to choose from. Our one requirement was that he could not take out any loans and we were not taking out any loans.</p>
<p>We told our(2) kids we would pay the equivalent of instate public u’s.<br>
If they got scholarships and/or there was money left over, it would be their’s upon graduation to use for grad. school or just to get started in life. </p>
<p>If they wanted a college that cost more than instate publics, they would have to come up with merit money to make it doable.
We were very clear that we would not take out loans to finance college nor would we allow them to.
Both chose instate u’s. Both had other possibilites but weren’t really interested.
S1 had a fullride, thereby graduated w/ a fair amt. of money unspent. S2 was full pay. He too had some money left in his acct. just not as much as S1. </p>
<p>We started this whole conversation when they were in middle school.</p>
<p>Sort of the same philoshopy as SteveMA, but our family is very visual, so I made a spreadsheet for our Daughter. It laid out cost at each school (tuition, fees, R&B, misc, etc, etc, etc - basically as detailed as I could be). Below that were three things on the plus side of the equation: what we had saved, what we expected to contribute out of current income, and any known offers of aid from the schools, even if they were “anticipated”. Sometimes we had two versions for a certain school - one if you get the scholarship, one if you don’t. Deduct the money from the expense and I told her “what’s left is your unmet need. This has to be paid for some way, either through you working a couple jobs during summers or taking out loans.” (And believe me, we had many discussion going as far back as Soph year on what “acceptable debt level” means.) This made things clear IN A HURRY. She didn’t end up picking the cheapest route at all, but she took one look at it, compared schools and said “well, School A had a great program, but it’s not worth $50K loans compared to School B”. Seemed to work well. I think at one point we had as many as 15 schools on there. It was seeing UNMET NEED that really hit home.</p>
<p>We told them we had saved $100K for each of them and that would cover costs on all our instate schools. No loans, summer job only and extra money to pay for other school programs. Or they could use that money toward a private school, but they would need merit money to do that, as our financial need was not going to be great, except the 3 years DS and DD overlap in college. We also said that we do not recommend loans at all, but if they needed to take out loans, we really did not feel comfortable taking out more than 20K or so total for all 4 years. DS chose a private where we pay the 25K, he has a nice merit scholarship and he pays for books and spending money and will need to take out about 5K in loans for 3 years. Not too bad. He works hard and is trying to figure out if he can some how not take loans at all. We will see how it goes.</p>
<p>DesignDad - we did this too. It was a real eye-opener for D2. She had NO idea. It sort of stressed her out, but she needed to know what she was getting into. It really helped her make good decisions. Made her cross a few off her list.</p>