Use savings, get loans, or do both?

njfootballmom
Tue, 10 Apr 2012 14:38:43 +0000

I’m on the same page as Lerkin. We had out son take out the Staffords, somehow we got some subsidized–probably the 2 in school at once did it. The deal is that we will pay them if he does well. If he screws up, they are his. We will give him the $ and he can pay the loan off or use the $ toward a house down-payment or whatever. If for some reason we don’t have the $ to pay them off and he has done well then I expect we will make the payments. Hopefully the interest rate stays low on them for 2012-13. If so, it might be worth making the payments and keeping $ invested…have to see what happens I guess.

We didn’t take any PLUS loans or anything because I can’t see the advantage. I’d rather risk using home equity line of credit at this point, unless I see signs of interest rates climbing.

Son is also at an an in-state public like I think lerkin is leaning towards.

One interesting thing I did was to open a new credit card last August. It was one year of zero interest and we got lots of rewards points for spending a certain amount in the first 60 days. They paid ME to “borrow” the money for a year. Obviously, we are paying it off throughout the year, but we didn’t have to liquidate the whole amount and can pay part of it with current income.

S1 did 2 years at CC and saved us a lot of $. It was convenient (1 mile away!), easy to transfer, and we weren’t sure if he was ready for 4 yr school. (not studious enough…)