Saving With Purpose: The College Savings Fund
This is the second post in a series called Saving With Purpose: Living a More Intentional Financial Life. In this series, I plan to highlight a number of specific savings goals my family has identified we would like to achieve over the next few decades.
Before having kids, both my wife and I agreed we wanted to help our children with their education. My own experience struggling to finish school after taking on student loans, and then charging tuition and books to a credit card, strengthened my position. Like all parents, I wanted better for my own kids.
However, we also want to balance our desire for them to have it easier, our own retirement plan, and my wish for them to learn the value of hard work. One of the mistakes many parents make is that so overload college savings they hurt their own financial plans.
I’ve known parents who saved $200,000 dollars in mutual funds for their kids’ college education, but have zilch in their own retirement plans, a big mortgage payment left from their refinance, and a host of other debts. I will always advise to take care of your own financial plans first, and college savings second. After all, there are no scholarships for retirement.
Having said that, because we are maxing out our retirement plans (more on that in an upcoming post in the series), we hope to also fund our kids’ college needs – at least a large percentage of them. Unfortunately, we got a late start because we put off college savings while paying off our debts. The good news is that we have more to save without debt payments. The bad news it will take some hefty savings contributions to cover college expenses for our oldest, now 10 years-old.
Determining Future College Costs
Hope you are sitting down for this section. College costs are ridiculously expensive, and getting more expensive every year as the rate of tuition costs increases at a faster rate than inflation (between 5%-8% per year). Let’s run some numbers at the website CollegeBoard.com, which has a pretty good calculator.
Assumptions
- Annual college costs, in today’s dollars: $19,388 (4-year public, in-state)
- College cost inflation rate: 5%
- Expected years of attendance: 4
- Percent of costs you plan to cover from savings: 100%
The inputs above yield the following future college costs for both kids:
- Tuition costs per year in 8 years: $28,645
- Tuition costs per year in 13 years: $36,550
For those keeping score at home, that works out to $123,463 and $157,574 (keep in mind, tuition continues to inflate the four years they are in school) in college expenses for our kids. Ouch. Of course, this is sort of a “worst-case” scenario considering most parents don’t have to pay “full retail” for tuition at most schools.
There are a variety of college scholarships, grants, tuition reimbursement plans (if employed), etc. that can help defray some of the costs. But if you’ve learned anything about me from the site, I like to aim big, so let’s work with these numbers for now.
Accounting for the modest amount we currently have in 529 plans, and a 7% growth rate of the funds (which may be a tad optimistic given recent history), that same website suggests we increase our monthly 529 savings plan contributions to $715 a month for our oldest child ($512 for our youngest). Okay, so it looks like we’ll be cash flowing a good bit of her tuition if she doesn’t earn any scholarships, because saving that amount would be a stretch.
So what’s the lesson here? Start saving early! If my daughter was a newborn today, I’d only have to save about half of that monthly amount (roughly $450) to hit a target 18 years out. If I had only taken my own advice ten years ago.







