<p>"… it’s darned near impossible to sell that house" - That’s a great point. Also… in addition to dealing with escalating escalating colleges costs, many families are also dealing with dinged investment funds. </p>
<p>College costs should not be a surprise at senior year. I’m surprised that high schools don’t discuss this more earlier, so that families can have realistic expectations. We attended the GC evening education sessions, and they pretty much said… “apply for admission and aid, and then see what happens”. About 6 years ago, when web was not quite as common… a GC was surprised when I sent a link showing that you could do ballpark EFC calculations.</p>
<p>OP, upthread someone suggested that you rejigger your college tour travel plans to avoid schools that will be unaffordable. Another suggestion is that you include some schools that could be your daughter’s “safety” schools. One of the best pieces of wisdom on CC is to “love thy safety”. It’s easy to fall in love with the expensive hard-to-get-into schools, much harder to find ones that you love that are affordable and easier on admissions! Also, try to see schools that want you to show demonstrated interest, either for admissions or for merit aid. The Ivies and many of the east coast schools your D may be eyeing don’t care if you visit. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>It seems this is true for some schools, but not all. I called every school on D1’s list to see if they required students to apply for need-based aid freshman year in order to receive institutional aid (that is, awarded by the college itself) in subsequent years. None of those schools did. So yes, do check, but don’t worry that this is true for most schools.</p>
<p>Can this gentleman’s question be answered with out taking him to task on the definition of middle class and how he should have lived his life?
My family is in a very similar situation we will either pay full freight at an Ivy or Upper Tier LAC or we go Flagship State School or lesser tier LAC with merit based money providing some off set. This is what I anticipate any way.</p>
<p>greatkid,
many of us have answered[ to the best of our ability] and given the OP lots of suggestions and food for thought.
try reading all 124 posts .</p>
<p>Good point Bluebayou - those student loans. My kids understand they are graduating with about 20k of debt. Their payments should be about $200 a month when they graduate which they should be able to handle.</p>
<p>And I forgot to include the most important way we cover the enormous tuition bills - increase salary. After consulting part-time for years, I went to back to work full time and my entire salary goes toward college costs for our three kids. </p>
<p>We were able to cover about 50% of the bill with aid, student loans, and savings, but the other 50% has come from income. Our D is a freshman so we have three years left, and not a day goes by that I don’t think about how much we are spending. It is very painful. Wish we had saved more!</p>
<p>Sorry, I didn’t read the whole thread, but if you look at paying for college as 1/3 savings, 1/3 current income, and 1/3 loans, you should be able to make the full-pay at any college with an income of $200K per year.</p>
<p>For COA $220K, you should have saved $73K for college (reasonable at your income), you can pay $18K cash per year (reasonable at your income), and take out $73K in loans (which comes out to $27K in loans for your offspring - doable, and $46K for you - doable.)</p>
<p>Our kids knew in middle school that if they wanted to attend a college without $$ being a significant factor in their decisions, they’d have to help pay for it. They will both have about $20k in Staffords upon graduation, they have PT jobs during the year and are expected to work in the summer. </p>
<p>S1 has skills that make summer positions easy to find and are lucrative. He also got a partial merit ride at his school plus some external scholarships, so between those things and the Staffords he is contributing about 40% of his freight. </p>
<p>S2 may have a summer study abroad for his foreign language (part of his double major) or unpaid career-related internship at some point. How the costs get allocated for that – we’ll see as things develop. S2 is also contributing, but more along the lines of 20%. Nevertheless, it is a decent chunk of change the two of them.</p>
<p>How did we fund? We are still in our first house – an older, smaller place and did serious damage to the mortgage so we’d be able to tap into the home equity line. This was before the housing market died, but we haven’t taken out any equity for upgrades in the almost 14 years we’ve been here, so there is an asset there. We drive our cars into the ground. No help from grandparents, no other properties. </p>
<p>We have lived below our means since the kids were small, knowing they were likely going to be expensive to educate. I went back to work part time when S1 went to college, after five years of unpaid medical leave and against medical advice. Every penny I make goes to college – but it’s $$ we didn’t have to borrow. We do direct deposit to our “EFC” account every pay period, so we are used to not seeing that $$ in the checking account. We got some FA for the two years both kids are in school, but expect that will end when S1 graduates in June. So far, so good.</p>
<p>Yeah, that’s what I was thinking … max of 20k … 5k per year in loans. Not sure my D has really focused on that part yet.</p>
<p>As I’ve mentioned in other threads, my parents paid zero toward my college and zero toward grad school. I worked full-time and took five years to graduate and took out student loans.</p>
<p>I remember the little coupon book that I had to tear out and send with each payment. Thought it would take forever to pay back but I did.</p>
<p>It’s $200 a month now to pay back? That sounds like a lot of money for a new grad to have to pay. Oh well. Over how long a period of time?</p>
<p>I make a bit more than half the OP’s household income but we’ve saved enough for two full-pay privates. Are we in the middle-class? No. We paid off the mortgage when the kids were quite young and have been debt-free since around 1999. We don’t require any contributions from our kids though our son has saved up a fair amount of money from working during the school year and summers.</p>
<p>I took out $1,000 in loans to attend BC way back when. Ten years to pay it off at 2% interest rate. The salary at my first professional job was $12K/year and I paid off the loan in the first year. I didn’t want to have to remember to send in the checks. Those were the good old days when college costs didn’t break the family piggy bank.</p>
<p>I plan to sell one of my kidneys to pay for college. Just kidding! My family just pay half from our earnings and half from savings. So every year, for example, I can pay $30K out of salary and $20K from savings.</p>
<p>“It’s easy to fall in love with the expensive hard-to-get-into schools, much harder to find ones that you love that are affordable and easier on admissions!” - Aint that the truth.</p>
I don’t know why you’d include the ‘tax bite’ since you’ll pay that whether you spend the 50K on college or not. You’re really talking about 50K - not 70K.</p>
<p>If someone’s in the 200k salary range is a year away from retirement, and especially if they have rental income, then they should also have their mortgage already paid off regardless of where they live. If they made the decision to buy-up at a later stage in life knowing full well they’d carry an expensive mortgage into the college years and into retirement then they either just weren’t thinking ahead or paying for college wasn’t as high of a priority for them as an expensive house.</p>
<p>IMO anyone making 200K plus this close to retirement should have already taken care of college costs and if not, they should consider postponing retirement by a few years to pay as they go - paying the 50K out of a 200K salary isn’t that hard unless one has ‘really’ over extended themselves. Also, don’t you have the option of selling off one of your rental properties to pay for it?</p>
<p>I know everyone’s circumstances are different but for some paying for college is a priority and people find a way to make it happen including making less expensive choices on the college but really, at 200K a year away form retirement you s/b able to pay this unless you have some unavoidable high expenses (I’m not talking about a house you decided to buy but rather, a sick relative or something).</p>
<p>Hmm. My D and I didn’t find that to be the case. Maybe we did it wrong? Seriously, neither of us went in with the idea that the only “lovable” schools were ones that were out of reach financially and/or academically. And we found plenty to love 'twixt the (sort of) financial safety of our state flagship and the most expensive, most selective schools.</p>
<p>To find our ideal list, we first scoured the Fiske Guide; my copy is liberally dog-eared and crazily annotated with hundreds of marginal notes and underlined sentences in multiple highlighter colors. I’ve got a stack of many other well-worn college guide books. Once I’d scanned the books, I took my list of candidates to CC, asking lots of questions and reading lots of posts new and old. And we visited. Every one of the schools we were interested in, we visited, even if only as a drive by. </p>
<p>As luck would have it, my D instantly fell in love with a well-regarded LAC that Fiske Guide calls a “best buy” and where her stats seemed likely to get her in with good merit aid. We were right. Sure, we looked at more expensive and selective schools. But that school was one of several she’d have been thrilled to attend, and where the price was reasonable and her stats were competitive.</p>
<p>MarkBass,
Ditto here. DH and I both put ourselves through undergrad and I supported DH through grad school. Didn’t buy a house til we were married 14 years because we were paying student loans, daycare and saving for a down payment.</p>
<p>$20k in Staffords at ~$200/mo. will take about ten years. S1 would like to pay it off in a year or two. S2, who is not likely to make as much as his brother straight out of school, will probably take longer. I think it’s a reasonable amount of debt – enough that they have skin in the game and will have to take it into account in budgeting, but it’s not so much debt that it poses a serious impediment to getting a car, an apartment, and other steps towards living as an independent adult.</p>
<p>and I each had $7k from UG, then DH took another $47k in GSL and PLUS loans for grad school. He was thankful we were married by then, as I paid for all of our living expenses, plus he worked in the summers and got a scholarship from his school. Could have been a lot worse. Payments between UG and grad loans for him ran $900/mo and dropped as the smaller loans were paid. We killed off my loans and one of his small UG loans before he went back to grad school.</p>
<p>GladGradDad said “paying the 50K out of a 200K salary isn’t that hard unless one has ‘really’ over extended themselves.” </p>
<p>I don’t know of anyone who could even come close to doing that, and most of my friends make right around that salary range, and all of them are quite frugal compared other similar families in our neighborhood (no luxury cars etc). </p>
<p>As an example, the average savings rate in the US recently rose to a record 6% while the average savings rate for someone in the top 5% of earners (roughly the group we are talking about) last year turned NEGATIVE for the first time. Even if someone is living below their means they would be hard pressed to lose 25% of their gross 200k income, or approximately 33% of their take home pay.</p>