financial planning for college | College Planning Team

Book Review: The End of College, Part 3: A Look At The Future

This blog is the third segment of an extensive review of Kevin Cary's book, The End of College, which proposes a new credentialing system that will upend traditional college credits and degrees. Coming soon: A new college credentialing system In the next five years, students around the world will have a choice of over 5000 online courses featuring some of the best professors from our nation’s leading universities that they can take without cost. These online courses are the same courses,…

Calculating Your College Budget: Real-Time Answers

Calculating your college budget can be a mysterious process. Families have a difficult time predicting the awards. In reality, there are still the real-time answers that only the college can answer for you to help prepare for how to make a budget plan for college students. Stephanie Kennedy was showing me the proprietary software used by her academic team to help families with the college search process. I was quite impressed with how the software enables her team to quickly optimize a student’s…

5 Questions to Ask Your College Funding Adviser

According to Kalman Chany, author of Paying for College Without Going Broke, using an accountant to do your college financial plan can actually cost you thousands of dollars in potential financial aid. Here are 5 questions to ask before you make a decision to retain anyone as your college funding adviser: 1. Should I increase my retirement contributions to lower my adjusted gross income during my child’s college years? If the accountant says yes to this question, you definitely have the wrong person…

The Base Years Change Everything!

March 12, 2014
MCPTmikeM
Paying for College

As a tax accountant and financial planner for over 25 years, on many occasions, I have found that my usual tax and financial planning recommendations are significantly affected when I learn that my clients are approaching the base years for their college-bound children. (The base year is the calendar year immediately preceding the year in which their child will begin college.) Here are a few examples of the typical tax and financial questions I ask clients who do not have…