Parents and College Savings
My best friend had her first child about two and a half years ago. She’s extremely financially responsible, I’d say probably the more fiscally responsible than the two of us actually. She began putting away money for her baby almost from the moment he was born. And it wasn’t easy either, because she is a full time nurse and her husband works managing a bar.
While they make what’s considered “pretty good money” by today’s standards, that almost isn’t enough any more. With the rising housing costs, and general inflation, it seems even people who make a good living have fallen behind the eight ball lately, and it’s hard to do anything other than just get by paying the bills in this modern day economy.
More parents need to take their cue from her, and no matter how hard it may seem to just sock away that little bit of money evey month for your child’s future education or whatever they may choose to endeavor, it sure will help your child and you out a lot when they actually go on to higher education, if this is what they choose to do.
Just this year alone, college tuition went up a record amount, and as I reported before, the amount of financial aid stayed the same, so the cost of college tuition is actually outpacing the financial aid available to college students now. Hopefully this will get better, but statistics show financial trends like this only generally continue to get worse.
Save, save save, because you never know what the future may bring, and it could be a lot less painful today to save that couple of bucks than it will be tomorrow paying that high cost of education.
Not only that, make sure you put it in a nice, higher yield money market or something that keeps pace with inflation, don’t just tuck it away in the matress where it’s not earning any money. You’ve got eighteen years, and you could gain a substantial amount of interest during that time.
