@jadedhaven I do and don’t relate. When I first started running EFC and NPC’s and found out our EFC was 39k I thought that was insanely high and wrongly assumed that we wouldn’t really have to pay that. We are now at the end of D’s admission process, and unless we want to send her to our flagship for 25k a year, guess what? We really do have to pay 39k (plus a little because we’ll have plane fair and health insurance since she’ll be too far away for our insurance to cover her). And that’s with a $23,000 merit scholarship.
But as soon as we got her first acceptance and merit award back in January, I started doing some calculations and between what we have saved and what we can cash flow, DH and I have determined we can do it. He is keeping his 401k savings at 15%. I am lowering mine from 15% to 6% while D and S22 are in college. If we run into trouble, DH can lower his to 6%, too. We only have 1 $385 car payment own 2 other cars outright, 1 of which we can sell if we need to. When we bought our house 17 years ago, we bought less house than we could afford. I’ll never forget our loan officer pushing us to buy a more expensive house. We said “thanks but no thanks.” As a result, our mortgage is lower than a lot of our peers’ mortgages and will be paid off in 3 years, which doesn’t help us too much w/ D, but will help w/ her younger brother. We do take a LOT of vacations and spend on entertainment. We are going to cut our vacation and entertainment budget back. I have always had the luxury of not having to price shop at the grocery store or when I want something new for the house, etc. Since January, I have become much more price conscious, and I’m actually enjoying it-it’s a new challenge. We have stopped all our charitable giving (we had been giving about 4k a year).
To make sure our monthly cash flow plan will work, we started it in January. By the time we have to pay the first semester’s bill in July, we will have 6 months’ saved and we will have the confidence that we can do it.
We set a couple of ground-rules. D will not take any loans except the Direct unsubsidized loans. We will not take any PLUS loans or home equity loans. We will not use our retirement savings. Whatever we spend on D, we will have available (adjusted for inflation) to spend on S who is 5 years younger.
When I see some upper middle class parents complaining about how much college will cost or forcing their hard-working, bright kids to go to a commuter school, I see parents who are already living at the highest lifestyle their income will support and not wanting to cut back on anything.