What is your college savings target?

[Anonymous]

How much per child? How did you reach this figure? Thanks!

[Anonymous]

We used the savings calculator on savingforcollege.org. It lets you plug in the ages of your children, whether you want to save for public or private colleges, the percentage you want to save for, etc. It a great tool.

[Anonymous]

Thanks--I guess I should have phrased my question more clearly. What I'm wondering is what % of tuition you hope to have saved by the time college begins. I assume 100% would be overkill. We're planning to send our children to private school, so when the first goes to college, the additional cost each year (above what we had already been spending) might be in the range of 60% of tuition and fees. Under these circumstances, is 30% of four-year costs a reasonable target, with the assumption that we would take the other 30% out of our home equity?

I'm not interested solely in a response to our situation, but also more broadly in how people figure out their targets.

[Anonymous]

I would shoot as high as possible. The one person I know that did prepaid tuition at UVA when her son was 6 is still having to takes tons of money out to supplement his education. I will always be more expensive than you think. We are shooting for 80% private undergrad and grad school! Yes, that is about 200K now, ouch.

[Anonymous]

I've read that a reasonable target is to save 33%. One-third you can pay out of income when the time comes, and the other third can be loans.

[Anonymous]

175K to be split between 3 children.

[Anonymous]

If you are older parents, save more than the 33%.

[Anonymous]

Agree with saving as much as you can. We save 12K a year for 2 kids (500 each a month), we started each when they were born, when we were in our mid- thirties. It's tax free money!