#243 – Mastering College Planning with Ann Garcia

Welcome to the Money Boss Parent podcast. I am Anna, your host, and today I'm thrilled to have Ann Garcia also known as the College Financial Lady joining us to discuss college planning. And as a certified financial planner and the author of How to Pay For College. She's a thought after expert quoted in New York Times, Wall Street Journal, US News and World Report and has developed comprehensive framework for creating your own college plan. And I like her breakdown of financial tasks and conversations you can have as a family, also including college tasks as you breaking it down by your child's life phase. She's recently launched an interactive online course to help parents and students navigate savings and financial aid as a parent of twins who graduated debt free from college, and brings professional and personal experience to the table. Let's dive in into this discussion.

Hi, everyone, welcome back to the money boss parent Podcast. I'm excited for our conversation today. And welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me. I am excited. And we are talking about college planning. And it is such a big topic. And as well, we're gearing up to hit the record button just for this conversation. We were sort of

suggesting that perhaps we focused on different sections of this, you know, life that we have for kids while they're growing, and we're saving for college. And so because I do find that with clients that I work with, and the listeners of this podcast, that it could get overwhelming. And depending where you are on this phase of saving for college, different things in different activities, and maybe perhaps different conversations could be happening. So I know we can help all of all of our parents on the spectrum. But we'll take baby steps and start started here. So and maybe before we kind of get into more technical questions, tell us a little bit about yourself. And like, Why do you love talking about college planning?

Yeah, well, I'm like you, I'm a financial advisor. And early in my career, I just noticed that a lot of clients were coming in with questions about college. And, and, and, you know, one group was parents who couldn't figure out how to fit this gigantic expense into their regular budget with all the other jobs they had on their money. Another group was young adults who were college graduates who had so much student loan debt that they were really struggling with the basic building blocks of their adult financial life, you know, whether it was saving for retirement, buying a house to in some cases, even having a savings account, because their student loan payments took up kind of all of their all of their income. And I realized if I could help that first group, those parents who are struggling with this question, that maybe I'd see less of that second group, and I'm a parent myself, I have twins who graduated last year from college. So this was something that I knew I needed to know to know about from for my own purposes, as well. So I kind of just dug into the topic, and and I find it's really, you know, it's really empowering for families to be able to get in front of this, and to be able to actually plan for it and be proactive instead of reactive. And it leads to much better outcomes for for their children, when they're able to do that

very much agree with what you're saying is that you better be proactive versus reactive, because Haven't we have clients who come here, like my kids are ready to go to college, especially, like, in your case, when you have twins, it's like double the bills, right?

Or you get into your dream school. And it's the best of times and the worst of times, because you can't afford it.

Right? Right. So all the all the planning that you could have done. So let's dive in, you have a book that's called how to pay for college, a complete financial plan for finding your child's education, which I have a copy of. And I've been really enjoying all the different outlines and checklists and things that you have created. The one particular section that I think we should spend time talking about is where you create sort of a plan for depending on where you fall as a parent on this life phase of raising your child. And so based on that, you can start addressing this big gigantic topic of college planning. So I know you can do much better explanation than I can. But I'd love for you to walk us through, like starting from when you first just need maybe planning to have a child or you just had your first baby all the way until, you know, they're like going to college in the fall. So please walk us through that.

Yeah, well, I like to say that planning for college is equal parts financial planning and parenting, right, because you can do all the savings, you know, understand how the tax credits work and all of that. But if you're not having conversations with your kid about what your priorities are and what your values are in education and what you're doing to support them and what you're expecting Patients from them are, you can throw that all out the window because their friends are having those conversations with them. And, and, you know, and then you'll be trying to play catch up with with things that they're hearing from all other places in the world. I also believe it's never too early to start preparing for college as long as your age appropriate. And it's also never too late. So by age appropriate, I mean that kindergarteners don't need to understand about student loans. You don't need to choose your preschool based on which one sends the most kids to Stanford or Harvard. But you do need to sort of break down the project of preparing for college into bite sized chunks that will help you to be more successful. And so you know, if you're the parent of a very young child, or maybe and you're expecting your first child, financial steps that are great to take are opening a 529 and starting to starting to fund it, you know, your child does not have to be born for you to open that account. But you know, the sooner you open that savings account and start funding it, the more work your money does, and the less work you do, because it has more time to compound and grow. On the other hand, there's non financial pieces as well. When kids are young, it's really important for parents to get on the same page about what their expectations are not just 100% Our kids are going to college or we'd like college to be one of the pathways available to them, or college isn't really anything we care about at all, that's going to be totally up to them if they go or or not. But you know, make sure that you're aligned on that, and not just on whether or not but what you feel is a reasonable commitment for your family, to make for parents to make it with respect to college, the good news is, college is available at literally every price point from zero to six, you know, going on rapidly approaching seven digits with, you know, with graduate school and whatnot. So it's your job as a parent to figure out which of those pathways you want to make available to your child. And how you're going to navigate the pathway to get there. As kids get a little older. You know, even at elementary school, that's a great time to introduce the concept to them of college as not as something that you know they need to strive for, or that they're, you know, second grade GPA and activities and soccer team performance matters for but as something that enriched your life and that you would foresee enriching their life, you know, kind of an interesting lesson for me as my kids were in high school was that they get so much messaging about you have to do this. So you can go to good college, you have to do this, you can go to good college, oh, well, if you do that, you're not going to go to a good college and whatnot, that it's oftentimes not something they're really excited about her anticipating, or, you know, seeing all the positives about about going to college. So I think it can be really helpful to just introduce it. Like I said, as something that enriched your life, whether it's friends you made in college that are still friends, experiences that you had in college, you know, gosh, I never knew what caused thunderstorms until I took a meteorology class in college, going to a college sports event or some other event on on a campus just sort of introducing the concept of college as, as something you'd like them to look forward to, and, and like them to consider as part of their as part of their pathway.

I think I think I want to comment here a bit as my son just about to start kindergarten. So I'm like, at the very beginning of this next 12 years, right? But I mean, I've noticed even just like applying for this kindergarten, it is just like this, this, this this are around parents, like it's so competitive, it's like, you've got to, you know, do all these things. And so, these are the right, these are the messages that our kids are receiving, you know, from their parents from like this, this early age where it's like, you know, every family has a different beliefs around what college should look like, where they go, how much they want to spend on it, but we're like, kind of like, are the you know, the products of our own doings, right, like we are the parents who are like, leading by

examining those expectations for them. Yeah. So

I thank you for like reminding that because I think it's important. Yes, it's like it's a big goal to save for college and, you know, every parent should decide for themselves and for their family. But yeah, we're kind of like putting your kids in those on that pathway. So I I appreciate that. Yeah,

you know, I think a great saying the other day, which is that the most important name on your college diploma is yours. You know, not where your diploma comes from, but the fact that you went out there and and are in debt. And I will say, you know, as a parent of twins were a focus group of two, one of my kids went to a single digit acceptance rate private school, that other went to a public school that you basically sign up to go. And I don't say that to denigrate that school at all, it was a fabulous place for him, they both have the same job now. Exact very different academic pathways lead to the same outcome. Now, two different companies. He was finance, she was computer science. So different roles, but they're in those fortune 500 management, training companies, programs, you know, same salary, same, you know, big company training path, same will pay for your MBA, if you stick around for a few years. So, so there are loads and loads of pathways to good outcomes.

And to I think a lot of, you know, I've had conversations with clients, because this is the question that came up, especially like in the last, what, four years since COVID, unfolded, right? Like, what would the world of education look like? Do we want to continue saving in our 529 plan, when our kids are going to be doing remote studies from you know, from from our living room, so like that, you know, like, presented a lot of questions in, in parents heads, and even students that are like, I don't want to go to college, because I have to do all of this zoom, you know, classes and such. So in? Yes, I and I will speak for my younger parents group as a representative of them right now. I, you know, I think it still comes down to what are your values as a family? What do you want for your kids to experience? And if it is going to college, then you know, maybe that's the path you explore? If it's not, or if it's some combination of, I don't know, you know, learning on the job or like vocational schools or whatever, right. That's also, you know, something that you can do, and there's lots more flexibility, you could probably speak to that. And as well around 529 plan, right. So it's like the money disappear. Let's maybe address that. Yeah. And

that's great. And there's also this was also fairly recent change about using a $10,000 a year to pay for K through 12. educational expenses. Yeah, so

you can use? Well, it depends. So so these are all federal rules, and some states have chosen to go along with them or not to go along with them. So I'm in Oregon, I think you're in California, and neither of our states have gone along with that. But yes to that using the money for for private school for private K 12. But many states many states have. Yes.

So that's another great advantage to do that. Okay, Ken, let's go back to that, to that phase plan of conversations and financial tasks you have. So we talked about this sort of newborn to kindergarten age, and then the next phase would be kindergarten to like middle school, like how, yeah, what happens after that?

Yeah, well, so on the financial side, when I think one of the most important things to do is to make sure that as your circumstances change as your ability to contribute changes, that you're looking at what you're contributing to your 529 and adjusting that, ideally, upwards. As you go through life, I think a great thing to do is every year on your child's birthday, you know, spend a few minutes reflecting about what a great year you've had. And then spend a few minutes thinking about the person that you're trying to develop and, and what are the pathways you want to make available to them? And maybe that's an opportunity to look at your budget and say, hey, you know, it looks like we've got an extra $20 a month in our budget that we could increase our 529 In savings, you know, people often say, oh, you know, don't save in a 529, you'll get less financial aid, here's the thing, more savings will give you more choices. And I think as parents, what we really want is to have a set of good choices for for our child. And the best choice for them is that they can get through an undergraduate degree, ideally, without taking out any student loans. Next best choice is by limiting themselves to the Federal Direct Student Loan. And so for most families, that means you need to have some savings, to supplement that, besides just what you can pay out of out of out of cash flow. So, you know, look at your budget, periodically, try to come up with some additional funds. Another thing that I think is great is most 520 nine's have a tool called a gifting page. And gifting page lets other people who are generous with your child, you know, grandparents, aunts, and uncles, friends also contribute to their education. And so leading up to birthdays and holidays, maybe this is a, hey, we don't want a bunch of toys this year, what we'd really love is for you to support our child's education, and share the share the gifting link to to your 529. I think, you know, having continuing those conversations with your kid and having them evolve over time, you know, maybe it's finding an event at a local college that you can attend, you know, most colleges do, you know, they do STEM days for kids, or they do this that in the other activity, they have tons and tons of activities, targeting children in their area at different at different ages, from, you know, late elementary school, really up through high school, because the thing is, most colleges are actually trying to get students interested in them. They're trying to get students to to apply, and if they imply then to enroll. So oftentimes, they do they offer terrific programs that allow kids to, to, to come and experience life on the campus for a day or participate in a workshop or, you know, something like that, that gives them an experience of the college, or just go and visit a campus. I mean, college campuses are cool, they're you know, there's a lot of really interesting, you know, interesting stuff to see, you know, if you're traveling, go, you know, go visit a school when you when you when you travel, and just and just check it out. I think when you get towards middle school, that's a really good time to start introducing the idea of college costs, money and different colleges cost different kinds of money, you know, chances are good that your kid is going to have some friends who have older siblings, who might be applying to college or getting close to applying to college. And so they're starting to hear names of different colleges. And that can be a really good opportunity. You know, being in Portland, a lot of kids will apply to University of Oregon and Gonzaga. And so those are names all of our kids know. And so that's a great opportunity to to have a conversation about the difference in cost between public and private schools, and getting scholarships. It's also a time, you know, when kids start to have a little bit of a sense of money, where it can be appropriate to say, we've been saving for your college, and we've been saving, because it's important to us. And because we've saved, you're going to have a good set of choices, those choices might not be unlimited. And but but college is important to us, and we're saving for it. Because we because we we want it to be we want it to be a possibility for you. That's also a really good time to look at your savings budget, look at your spending budget and say, What does this translate to? So if I project my savings out to the end of high school, based on what I'm contributing and having, hopefully some earnings in the account as well, you know, how much do I have in savings? How much can we afford out of pocket? What does that translate to? Does that look like a four year degree programs is like two years, does it look like public private? Does it look like student loans, no student loans. You know, figuring that out, when you've got lots of years to course correct or adjust is can be really beneficial rather than waiting till senior year, when your child has already applied, trying to match up financial aid award letters to your budget. Because if you're in middle school, you know, you can say okay, here's what I can do budget wise, you know, I can carve out another $50 a month to put into a 529 or $100 a month or $20 a month or I can get grandma and grandpa to give $100 a year, whatever, whatever that is, but it may also mean okay, we got to stop talking about these certain schools. And we've got to start, you know, managing our expectations that that public school is what we can afford, and we'll probably be able to find some private school pathways that the same or similar or similar price point or maybe We really were targeting a two year residential college experience and maybe two years of community college or AP or IB credits or something like that. But just so that you're managing your own expectations as well as your child's. Yeah,

I love that a lot, because I think parents get shocked a lot of times when they sort of see the numbers, right, we're, as financial planners crunched the numbers all the time for them, like, here's, here's the two examples, right? Do you kind of, you know, the most optimistic plan is perhaps to have enough to send them to the best school in your, you know, in your mind versus like, here's a state school or something that you can actually afford. So I liked that suggestion is to kind of have those reality checks. From time to time, I do also find clients that kind of have this tendency to like, Okay, we just had a child, and we're going to start like, full speed ahead, saving, you know, let's say for state school, right, wherever state they live in. And that's great, too, right? Because at once you had your baby, there's like so many more years to go, you don't know what's going to be what's going to come out how life is going to change. But as you mentioned, to and like the Headstart that you do get with, with savings, whether it is in the 529 plan, or wherever else, ideally, 529 would be a great first stop, but you sort of give yourself this cushion in case you do have to pass the savings, and you do have to make changes and adjustments. And so I but yeah, I love the idea that you give people permission to reassess and reevaluate because

it's life. Yeah, yeah. Like so often, as financial planners, we treat your financial life as being completely linear. In a nice smooth line, and every year, you're gonna max out your, your 401k, and you're gonna put this much in your 529. And, you know, this much and all these other buckets, and life isn't like that, you know? Exactly as lifee. Yes.

And it does have all kinds of ups and downs now. So I'm, the one kind of angle here I want to introduce is because, well, because life is not just the last, you know, line that we're describing. So how do you as parents, right, young parents, you know, or parents who have kids that are a little bit older, sort of balanced this college savings goal versus all of the other goals? It's like, most classical question. Yeah,

well, and it's one where there's so much bad advice out there, you know, the sort of the old trope is don't save for college, save for retirement, because there's loans for college, but not for retirement. And that's why we have almost $2 trillion in outstanding student loan debt is, is because people have chosen not to save for college. Anything that's important to you, that's a large future price, you need to save for it. And it needs to you know, it needs to fit in your priorities. Now, obviously, emergency savings comes first, retirement savings come second, and college savings is after, after all of those, my rule of thumb is kind of best if you're not maxing out retirement, so you're not doing the 23,000 or 30,500, depending if you're over under 50. If you're not maxing out retirement, then no more than 10% of what you're contributing to retirement should go into college. So if you're saving $10,000 a year for retirement, then $1,000 A year is what use is the most you should save for college. And if you want to increase that college savings, you'll move those numbers up together. So I'm gonna bump up my retirement savings and with that my college savings, you know, the nice thing with borrowing K contributions because you get that tax deduction, you know, it creates a little bit of extra, you know, extra free cash flow for you. If, you know, if you are maxing out retirement, then maybe look at targeting what's the amount you need to contribute to get the maximum state income tax deduction or state tax benefit if you're in a state that offers a tax benefit. Or maybe you want to work backwards from the cost of four year college you know if it's if you wanted to have public in State College fully funded by the time your child graduated from high school, that's $350 a month every month. So you know so once you you know once once your other savings is really up and running, then you can start looking at creating a larger portfolio of choices through a larger body of savings for for your kid for college, but college is available at every price point. You do not have to save $2,000 a month in order for your kids to have a productive future, you know, future future life. I mean, my my son has a friend who paid $0 for her four year degree. You know, she did two years of free community college and then she worked for Starbucks that had a tuition partnership program with Arizona State, you know, kind of what you mentioned online school. And so she finished up there, you know, she knew she was going into a career path that wasn't going to be high paying and her family wasn't able to support her financially through college. And so she did that. And guess what? Her diploma looks the same as everyone else's.

Yeah, there's different You're right. There's different paths. And I mean, their stories to everybody. Everyone heard these stories, not just us, financial professionals where, you know, parents had saved a lot of money paid for the education, or a degree and it yielded virtually nothing, right? It's, it's yes. I mean, there's all kinds of probably thoughts that went into it. But you hear that too, where it's like, Okay, why don't we do all of this for what you sort of kind of question? And it's totally

fine to, you know, we often, you know, we often fall into the trap as advisors of saying, well, private school costs $85,000 a year. So here's how much you need to save to go to private school. And public school costs $35,000 a year. So here's how much you need to save to go to public school. It's perfectly fine to say this is my college budget, and I'm going to go and find colleges that will educate my child for that budget.

How do you come up? Sorry, how do you come up with a budget?

So coming up with that budget, as a matter of here's what I'm able to save? Here's what I'm able to spend out of cash flow? Am I okay? You're not okay with my student taking out the student loan, add that all up. And in fact, there's a worksheet in my book, how to pay for college, that is how to create your your college budget, and all the worksheets in there are downloadable, so you don't have to be like me, you know, writing tiny numbers into tiny, tiny boxes. But there's a worksheet in there to to figure out what your college budget is. And then, you know, look at that number divided by four years divided by two years, you know, what's, what are some of the pathways that that worked for, for you, you know, each of my kids had a college budget for my son, who was not exactly what you would call an academic superstar in high school. You know, we told him that his budget was the was the equivalent of what it would cost him to go in state and he found a terrific opportunity to go out of state with a great scholarship. That made it cost actually less than than staying in state. And then, as a student, he got a scholarship for playing video games.

Parents living the dream. Oh, my gosh.

You know, his twin sister went to a private school. And again, her budget was not unlimited. Her college that she ended up going to was, at the time, the most expensive school on Earth. And it was also the one that came up with the biggest scholarship package for her. So it ended up being her second cheapest choice after staying in state where she had a full tuition scholarship. So, so don't rule colleges out just because you're not able to pay able to pay this the sticker price because every college offers, every college offers some form of scholarship.

Yeah, I liked I liked this for parents to hear this like notion that there's flexibility because I think I mean, I think like the first thought comes to mind like, Okay, what's the cost of the college? And you you know, and you look at the number, like you said, Your daughter went to the most expensive college on Earth, it's like, okay, well, how can we afford it, but then you talk about how she received, you know, a ton of money in scholarship. So that helped pay, you know, pay for it. But as you're like, is your younger parent thinking about that? Right? It's like, because you don't know what scholarships might be available. You don't know what your child? Will they be playing video games, and they get really lucky. Oh, will they be, you know, taking all the AP courses and still not, you know, get the whatever the I've heard that GPA GPAs these days are not what they used to be when we were in college. So it's like it's a balancing act. I think that's what we're really getting at here with savings and expectations, too. Yeah,

yeah. And it's just, you know, having a realistic set of expectations, not just for what you would like to post on Instagram, but for where your child is going to succeed and where they're going to engage. And, you know, what kind of learner are they? How do they make friends? And how do you find an environment that supports them for that for your pathway to a degree, I mean, like my son, I can't I can't imagine that he could have made a better a better college choice than he did. Like I said, he was not a good high school student. He flunked high school calculus. He ended up tutoring statistics in college because he was the top student in his statistics class. Wow. Because he engaged and he was he was a motivated student when he got there because he was in an environment that was a really, really great, great fit for him.

Yeah, yeah. You building on those strings. I wonder I want to touch on the older kids write or delete the later part of the savings path that you were talking about. So at some point, you really need to start having conversations with your older kids about like how these things were And as you, you know, as you've had your kids, like, you know, once they hit high school, I mean, that's when a lot of planning right, and preparation starts to happen. So share with us how parents can start to engage the whole family, because it's not just still you're the parents saving, we now need the students to be involved. Yeah, well, I

think, you know, I think the most important thing is to have conversations with your child from the perspective of goals rather than constraints. Right. So our goal is that you can graduate debt free from college, we've been saving a lot. So you can do that. And our savings and our abilities to support you translates to a budget of x, we know that you could graduate from Oregon State Debt Free with that budget. And we're pretty sure that you could find other opportunities in that same budget, and we will support you in finding those opportunities, for example. And, you know, another thing that I think is super helpful for parents to do early in your student's high school career is, look up, what merit scholarships your state colleges offer, almost all of them do offer some form of Merit Scholarship, many are automatic. So a lot of schools say, you know, if your GPA is above 3.8, you get this match. If it's about 3.7, you get this match. So understand what those criteria are, so that you can plan your students high school course load, so that you will get the grades that that will get you the maximum scholarships, I feel like we, you know, when you get to high school, there's always a lot of pressure from your high school to sign your kid up for the most rigorous courses available. And there are students for whom that's a great fit, you know, my daughter did full IB, everything, loved it loved the rigor, love the level of discussion and engagement in the classroom, my son really struggled, he was a normal kid didn't want to spend five hours a night to go. And, and what was really what was really disappointing to see, you know, besides the number of nights that we spent, you know, consoling him as he was crying over his homework, saying, I'm the dumbest person in all my classes, and whatnot. Besides that, if he had had a little bit better GPA, you know, if we had, if we had maybe dialed back on some of the IB classes that he took, and the advanced math that he took, he would have gotten an extra $12,000 a year in scholarships from the college that he ended up going to. So So I think, look at your child look at look at, you know, choose an academic pathway that's a fit for them, it may or may not be the best fit for your High School's guidance counselor, or the IB program coordinator who wants to get everyone into those classes. But make sure that your child has an opportunity to be challenged and also an opportunity to be successful.

Yeah, yeah. I, you also mentioned a few times that you get your kids involved. And like, I think you were comparing, like, here's what we as a family prepared for, but you can find another opportunity. So how they, because the kids don't know. So how do you make I just want like, maybe you have some practical advice for parents, like how do I get my sophomore involved? You know,

You don't have to go need to go. Yeah, personalities important for sure. Yeah, no, I love how I love your very practical approach to this. And I know you've like, as you were going through it, I'm sure there were a lot of lessons learned too. Which is, I think, also important, like highlight from this conversation today. It's like, you don't have to figure this out, like on day one. It's, it's all it's all like learning and living and learning kind of experience. But there are steps that you can take ahead of time. And yeah,

and I, you know, I think the most important thing is just, it's never too late to start. But the sooner you start, the more time you build in for yourself, not just for your savings to grow, but for you to come up with good choices and have good conversations and do your homework and, and also to stretch the tasks out, you know, senior year of high school is a really busy time. Besides the classes, you know, there's, you know, prom, and homecoming, and all the things that they're like, oh, my gosh, this is the last one I have to go, you know, and, you know, maybe they have a job, maybe they're in theater, or maybe they're doing sports, they're all these last and you want to be fully present for all those moments. And one of the best ways to be fully present is to have done as much of the college process before the start of senior year as you can. Yeah,

I love that. That's why I love your book so much because it gives these practical steps and applications. You know, wherever you find yourself on this savings, amazing kids journey until they start college and so so talk about where everyone can find your book. And I know you also mentioned that you have a training for parents and kids I assume to kind of go through to get more in the weeds of a lot of things that were discussed today.

Yeah, so my book is how to pay for college. And it's available from Amazon Barnes and Noble bookshop.org You know, wherever you buy books, hopefully you can find it. Hopefully you can find it there. And then my online course is called the college financial plan masterclass. You know, the book is really aimed for families at any point on the college planning pathway. My online course the college financial plan is is really targeted towards high school families who are in those final stages of, of getting ready for college. So it's, you know, really detailed, getting your budget nailed down, figuring out student loans, filing the FAFSA, and preparing for those, you know, researching colleges, all of that in a lot more depth. And that is on my website, which is how to pay for college.com.

That's fantastic. Thank you so much for these resources, and I'll make sure that we include them in the show notes for the podcast. Before we close. I know we've had a lot of interesting points here today. Is there anything parents need to hear because I know some would be like Oh, I think I totally got it and others are like, I'm still trying to get this out.

It's a great question. I mean, it's such a such a big topic, I'm trying to boil it down into, you know, one or two key things. So I would say, you know, the key takeaways, for me would be this, there is a college available at whatever price point is available to you. It's really important that you do the parenting to manage your child's expectations, so that that feels like a win for everyone in your family. And besides that, the most important name on your diploma is your own. It's not what school you went to, it's you and your child is going to be successful because of who they are because of who you've raised them to be. And going to college, going to any college is going to enhance that person. It's not the thing that's going to make or break them.

Yes, I like that. I think it's, it's something that a lot of families can can run with. So thank you so much, and for joining us today.

Thank you so much for having me.