<p>If you could go back to when you got your first job and established a plan for your children, or yourself, what would you change?</p>
<p>I would become God and control the future (does he/she do that?) and make sure my husband wouldn’t lose his job. But, seriously, I wouldn’t do too much different. We saved a lot, paid off our house, let our kids know that sometimes we’d have hard times.</p>
<p>What you are planning now is probably not applicable 18-25 years later. Things change.
Probably I would make some small change in the way how to educate my kids.</p>
<p>I would try to have twins.</p>
<p>I tried to keep up on current tax/college cost/investment plan information as much as I could, though I only really planned for the cost of instate publics as my income was never high enough to do more than that. I probably could have worked a second job and dedicated that income toward their college funds, but that may have been detrimental to their upbringing. If I’d known that the Great Recession was coming I would have changed the asset allocation sooner though, thankfully, it wasn’t necessary to make large withdrawals during the worst of it.</p>
<p>Probably not much differently. We timed our mortgage to end the year #1 went off to college and did the best we could to save. We gave them a budget to work with long before any “dream school at any cost mentality” crept in. The kids know it’s huge that we’re paying for their college and will be helping with the Staffords so really it is what it is. H went to a local public U and I went to private so the kids never grew up with the idea that big was better than small or vice versa.</p>
<p>Not had kids ;). Though frankly, that has more to do with other life complications than paying for college :)</p>
<p>H & I would sit on our duffs for 18 years, waste any money we did manage to earn when we got bored by buying stuff instead of saving, & then get really excited when our EFC of 0 would get our kids a free education.</p>
<p>Oh, it doesn’t work that way? I thought it did, judging from some of the posts I’ve seen on CC. ;)</p>
<p>Really, what I would do is save more than we did. We got really lucky … our plan was to have me go back to work around the time college bills would begin & pay for it with my new job. It took 2 years to find a job, it pays less than I thought I’d earn, and I got VERY lucky that I even have a job (as the bottom dropped out of the economy just as I found my job). It was a risk that may very well not have paid off, in which case our kids would be at a CC & a local U (which is fine, but just the same I am glad they were able to go away to schools of their choice). </p>
<p>When I quit work to stay home, we took a really big hit to our household income, so we never really felt we could save. In retrospect, we could have found ways to fund a prepaid tuition plan or a 529. It’s easy to say “we can’t afford it,” but many of us really could.</p>
<p>I would not get bad accounting advice about my business that necessitated borrowing 30K to pay taxes. Now kids are in college and I’m still trying to pay off that loan.</p>