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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]We’re you not making over $150,000 until very recently? If you didn’t want to save for college, then you either need to take parent plus loans or look at less expensive schools. [/quote]

No, we’ve been making quite a bit more than this for some time. We have clearly underfunded our 529. Too late to fix it now and, honestly, we didn’t realize until just a year or two ago that many colleges don’t offer merit-only-based scholarships. There must also be a demonstrated financial need. DH grew up dirt poor and received a full scholarship to a T20 school and then a full ride after through to a Ph.D. I went to a cheap in-state school.

But…we ran multiple college financial aid net price calculators and even with our below-par 529 balances, we’re told our net price is whatever the college charges and that our affordability is more than double the actual $80K cost. So, sure seems like the colleges think we can easily afford to send our kids there. Just wondering what levers they’re expecting us to pull?[/quote]

They were expecting you to save more. College is not a surprise expense. You could have  easily saved more.  Our income started near $100k when our children were born and is now around $200k. We were able to save around $400k. We knew college was coming up and we saved as much as we could from the start.  Not all of it was in 529s - we kept those to the expected cost of our in state options.  In the end, we ended up spending around $360k. Both graduated in the past two years. [/quote]

Are you in the DMV area? If so, then you probably scored a 1500+ on your SAT, even if you’re just average. This means you’re absolutely familiar with the concept of a geometric series. You’re probably also aware of the rapidly changing time horizon on college savings and, as such, the lower achievable growth due to the slightly more conservative mix of investments. Maybe 6% (r = 1.06) YoY on average over 18 years?

Okay, of course you are! So then you know that the $400,000 you saved must have taken yearly DCA contributions according to:

D = $400,000 * [(1 - r) / (1 - r^18)] = $12,943 per year = $1,079 in college savings per month over 18 years.

This is really impressive, especially considering your HHI was $100K when you first started. As with our other DCUM humblebragger, anyone saving this much for college is doing so after saving 20% for retirement. So, your gross HHI drops from $100K to $80K and this works out to maybe $68K after taxes? But you’re saving another $13K of top of that in college savings? Wonderfully done. You’re in the top 0.1% of savers. Your accomplishment is either not real or hardly able to be extrapolated to the remaining 99.9% of the population. [/quote]

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