The theme this week on the One Minute Retirement Tip podcast is: How to save $100,000 for your grandkids college.

Yesterday I talked about how saving as early as possible is key to saving $100,000 or more for college and also why it’s totally doable, especially if you’re pitching in to save for you’re grandkids college education and you make a plan before the baby arrives. 

Today, I’m talking about how to calculate how much you need to save for college. There are lots of online tools to help you understand how much you should save for college. My favorite is the one from saving for college.com. I’ll link to it in the show notes (ep 1061): 

https://www.savingforcollege.com/calculators/college-savings-calculator

How much you’ll need to save for college depends on a variety of factors: 

• The child’s current age
• How much you’ve already saved for college
• Household income of the parents which influences financial aid, scholarships, and grants
• And obviously, which college junior is aspiring to attend. The price tag for Harvard is very different that the local community college. 

The great thing about these calculators is that they will show you how big the gap is likely to be between what you’ll likely save and what the cost of college will be. So you can then make more informed decisions about saving more and whether or not they’d be better off going to community college for a couple years, staying closer to home and living at home while attending school, or taking on a student loan, which should be the last option considered. 

For many families, student loans are the default decision to plug the financial gap for college, but as I’ve explained earlier this week, the ripple effect of carrying student debt into adulthood will permanently alter the financial course of life for many Americans, and many will wonder why they could never seem to catch up or save enough for a comfortable retirement...the rock that started that ripple is too often student loans. 

My point today is to take the time to apply your grandchild’s individual circumstances to calculating how much you can and will save, and use it as a launchpoint to have a discussion with the child’s parents about how you both can have skin in the game and work toward a debt-free college degree. 

That’s it for today. Thanks for listening! My name is Ashley Micciche and this is the One Minute Retirement Tip.  

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Tags: retirement, investing, money, finance, financial planning, retirement planning, saving money, personal finance