I’m unusual. I’m a Financial Advisor (among else, see below) but unlike many FAs, I focus on playing defense, not offense. Let me explain.
I’m a Certified College Financial Consultant (CCFC). In English, this means that I educate and advise families on ways to lower the cost of college so they can give their kids an education without having to take on a pile of debt or rob their retirement (NOTE: 23% of all student loan debt in the US is held by people over the age of 50).
How did I end up here? It’s a long story.
Besides being a FA, which began in 2008 with Edward Jones, I’ve also been a college professor since 2002, the year I earned my PhD. For 7 of these past 20+ years, I served as a Dean. So college planning is a natural professional fit.
Between undergrad, grad school, and the 4 universities where I’ve been employed, I have first-hand experience with just about every type of college we have: small liberal arts colleges (Wooster), large flagship research universities (THE Ohio State), private comprehensive schools (Findlay, Webster, Tiffin), regional publics (Western Michigan, Georgia Southern), and the Ivies (I was the Hardigg Lecturer at Dartmouth in 2006).
I know the college game inside and out. And nothing in the world makes me happier than spilling the beans about the college financial system because the truth is that a big reason parents are getting screwed is they don’t know how it all works.
(*OK, that last part isn’t completely true. I actually like spending time on a boat with family and friends listening to Jimmy Buffett more than college planning. But the part about parents getting screwed because they don’t know how the game works is 100% true.)
And that is the second reason why I got into college planning: the morality of it.
Higher education is good for students. A college graduate will earn roughly $1 million dollars more in income over a lifetime, not to mention the intangible benefits like friendships made, figuring out how to adult in a relatively low-stakes environment, and learning that a steady diet of pizza and cheap beer causes weight gain (15 lbs in the first year, ask me how I know).
But higher education has become awful for parents. In fact, it’s become financially existential (sorry, I’m a professor of Philosophy).
Parents of college-bound students are usually in their 40s and 50s. Even if they’ve done a pretty good job of saving for college, and they make a good income, most still can’t afford to pay $100k-$300k per kid for a degree.
If your kid is smart and ambitious and wants to go to a “top” college (which is mostly bullshit, which I’ll write about in a future post), it can approach $400k! If you have 3 kids, you could be looking at $1 million dollars just for college – with retirement right around the corner.
What are parents to do? Refuse to pay and crush the kid’s dreams? Pay for college and work until you’re 70? The tradeoffs are agonizing.
The last reason I got into college planning is personal.
I was a “First Gen” student, meaning that my parents never went to college. So while it’s been a blessing to have gotten an advanced education, the curse has been that I had no idea how to pay for it and so I did what many do: I took out a bunch of loans. $150k by the time grad school was over, which took me 20 years to pay off.
That was a million dollar mistake because if I had avoided huge loan payments, I could’ve been investing that same amount for all those years and enjoyed the magic of compounding effects, which easily could have grown to over a million dollars for my retirement. Ugh.
Fast forward to 2018.
My oldest started looking at colleges. Naturally, he started looking at expensive ones (shocker: if parents tell their kids to go “explore” colleges…they’ll gravitate toward expensive ones).
Not wanting to let him down, but also not wanting to destroy my own finances any worse than I had already done with my own loans, I took a deep dive into college financial planning, eventually earning the top two financial designations in this area (CCPS in 2020, CCFC in 2023).
With my background, experience, and training (and help from generous grandparents in a 529 plan), I am happy to say he and my other two kids will be able to go to college without them or us having to take on a pile of debt.
The good news in all of this is that I learned first-hand, partly the hard way, how to overcome the challenge of paying for college. It is possible to avoid making a million dollar college mistake. You just have to know how the system works, what to do, and what to avoid.
It thrills me to no end to be able to do this work, sharing info with parents so they can put their kids through college and still meet their other goals – like, perhaps, setting on their boat someday enjoying good tunes with family and friends.
My wife, Krista, who teaches college English and is a boat captain. And our spoiled rescue dog, Stella.
*The content contained herein is intended as education and entertainment, and does not constitute investment, tax, or legal advice. Please consult the relevant advisor before making any decisions. Additionally, any opinions expressed here are solely those of the author, and do not represent the opinion of Leetown Advisors or its affiliates.
