College Funding Strategies for Hourly Financial Planning Clients

Discussing college funding while visiting the Lost River Range at Long Lost Creek

Hi everyone, it's a bit of a snowy day here in June. I'm in the Lost River Range at Long Lost Creek and I'm going to talk to you real quick about college funding.

Watch the video here.

How Hourly Financial Planning Clients Can Approach College Funding

Now, when you get to the point that your kid's in high school and you're starting to look at specifics about funding college, I'd suggest the first place to start is not looking at scholarships or which specific loans to get, but it's going to be setting a budget for college.

You want to start with the end in mind, so you want to look forward and see what's your kid interested in, what are they likely to major in, and therefore what is their salary likely to be when they leave college.

You can then get an idea of how much they can afford in loans. There's a limited amount of federal loans that they can get without your support, and of course they can get private loans, but you want to start by knowing how much they can afford when they leave.

And then you can work backwards from there to see how many other resources they have. Do they have money saved up? Are they going to be working in college or not? And then you can go from there to figure out which college makes the most sense to go to.

Setting a College Budget as Part of Hourly Financial Planning

Now this is kind of a backwards approach from the classic way, which is to just figure out which college sounds cool and all your friends are going to and that's the one you want to go to and therefore you have to pay for.

But instead, I'd suggest you look at it as an investment and try to figure out what they're going to be able to afford.

And then there's a lot of steps from there that you can take to figure out exactly how to get funding and how to, in some cases, play colleges off each other to lower your tuition or get better aid packages.

But start with the end in mind by figuring out a budget for college to drive the decision on where your child should go to college.

Thanks.