The financial demands placed on us at this time in our lives can be enormous. Many of us not only have children to care for but already have or soon may have parents or others who will rely on us financially.  It is critical that we take care of ourselves first before we can take care of others.  We all need to have a well thought out and aggressive plan to save as much money as possible for our later years. 

How does retirement fit into the college funding puzzle?

Probably the BIGGEST CHALLENGE we all face is outliving our income, or simply not having enough to live on in retirement.   We are a nation of spenders.   We save to spend, rather than save to save as we should.    {A recent study shows that a typical baby boomer has saved only 12% of what they believe they will need to have a comfortable retirement!}  {Another study tells us that the average couple at age 65 can be expected to spend $200,000 on healthcare alone in their retirement years!}  Are you ready for this? 

With the shortage of reliable information on exactly how the financial aid system works along with the abundance of misinformation being provided to us and the scarce resources available to help us comfortably get our children the education they need and deserve, we usually end up on a path to financial chaos by trying to go it alone.  Using a 'band-aid' approach to solve this problem is very common;  we have no idea how much it will cost in the first place and when the bill finally arrives we borrow money from the quickest source to pay for it and then borrow some more in the next year to do the same and so on.   The result is that we go further and further into debt until the debt load becomes unmanageable and we can no longer continue.

It should be obvious that knowing how to properly finance a college education is critical with regard to your overall lifetime financial picture. 

If there is no plan and we do a poor job of borrowing as a way to pay for our costs, we put ourselves at financial risk in several ways.   There is the probability that we will have to compromise our retirement savings which, as discussed above, we simply cannot afford to do.  Also there is the continued erosion of our standard of living caused by the loss of disposable income from our savings and cash flow.  If we use up whatever liquid assets we might have such as savings, bank CDs, investments, etc. before we do need to borrow, we then expose ourselves to significant financial risk in the event of a sudden large unanticipated expense such as a hospital bill, a critical illness, a disability or unemployment, as there is no emergency fund available.