To Your Family From Ours…
That’s my family on the book cover. Gabriel is 18, Emma is 11, and Ethan is 6.
How will we pay for their college education without destroying our current finances and retirement?
What will their future and our retirement years be like with so many things going wrong in the world and so much political dysfunction?
These questions have been a major source of stress for my wife and I for years (and truth be told, more than a few arguments.)
Do you know there are many myths about college …
[accordion all_closed=”true”][apane title=”Click to Open and Continue Reading”]
So I started researching figuring I had a head start:
1. I had graduated from Yale and served on the Yale Alumni Schools Committee interviewing applicants for years.
2. My uncle Jon is the Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid at the University of Rochester and has been recruited by many IVY League Universities and other colleges across the country.
3. My brother Adam is the founder of the top standardized test prep company in the country.
4. I read hundreds of books and articles on applying to college, financial aid, retirement planning and investing and sought the opinions of dozens of college admissions and financial aid experts.
5. My best friend is a CPA and a financial planner and together we dug into the financial implications of investing in college, tax laws, and investment strategies. He has had hundreds of clients over the last 26 years and so we did a form of “back testing” of their finances to see what would have happened had they made different decisions.
I kept one eye on the news.
What I learned scared the hell out of me. Moreover, I realized that a lot of the information available to parents and students was bad….or confusing…or not organized in a useful way. It blew my mind that people were dealing with college and their finances in such a fractured way.
Would you ever build a house with no plan, and hire a plumber, electrician, and carpenter who never talk to each other? No? Well most folks, don’t have an “architect” or “general contractor” for their college and financial planning either. They have financial aid officers, real estate agents, investment advisors, accountants, lenders, screaming heads on financial entertainment shows — who never talk to each other while all building important parts of your college education and financial house.
This really bothered me.
I spent 10 years working as an Executive and Board member with education and social service non-profit organizations and another 10 as a business consultant in the real estate, financial services, mortgage, and marketing industries. I saw how much families were hurt by poor financial decisions and how they were encouraged and manipulated into making bad decisions by people in those fields.
Anyway, I gradually stopped all the other work I was doing and started focusing on creating a better guide that started to take shape in the form of the book Paying Less for College: How to Minimize Financial Costs & Maximize Financial Aid.
The book and the companion guide will be published in October 2015, but I didn’t want to wait that long to make this information available to you so I’ve created several things.
1. www.PayingLessForCollege.com website.
Changes in admissions and financial aid policies and resources occur frequently that we needed a more dynamic way to share information. Please visit often.
2. Facebook Page and Group
Here you can get answers to your questions from myself, other parents, and many of the experts who have contributed to the book.
3. Presentations for Parents
These one hour presentations are usually held during evenings at schools. Though they are usually about financial aid topics they can also be on any of the topics covered in the book. (Versions of talks being prepared for students.)
4. In-Service Trainings
Provided for guidance counselors and other school staff on topics such as the latest changes to standardized tests I occassionally get sponsors that provide free brown bag lunches.
5. Scholarships
A partnership with an organization that will provide $500 scholarships just for interacting with this site and up to $52,000 total over four years for qualifying families to over 340 private colleges and universities.
6. School Fundraising Ideas
For example, we can give copies of books to every parent that attends a presentation in return for a donation to cover the cost of printing (about $2.50) with anything over that amount going to the school, guidance counseling department, PTA, or other non-profit host.
[/apane][/accordion]