Click here to download the transcript of Brad & Jocelyn’s best tips for making college affordable when you don’t qualify for financial aid!
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The cost of college is ridiculous.
You can give your child a high-quality education or have a free, clean home and a fully-funded retirement instead.
This trade makes no financial sense.
Of course, I’m a big fan of education. I believe in the importance of the college experience as a valuable starting point in the transition to adulthood, but the cost of college should not be so prohibitively high that it literally forces you to decide between higher education and a debt-free home plus retirement security.
This is so ugly.
Adding insult to injury, college education is the only job that demands your full financial statements before deciding how much to charge you. Imagine buying a car from a dealer who demands full disclosure of your net worth and every detail of your personal finances, including tax returns, before deciding how much he should charge you for the car.
Nonsense? Yes! But that’s exactly how the university business works.
To make matters worse, the system is rigged against many of my readers.
For example, some quality schools spend upwards of $70,000 a year on all-inclusive costs; This means a total of 280 thousand dollars if your child graduates in 4 years, and 350 thousand dollars if he graduates in 5 years. Even if you round that number up to $250k to be conservative, if you have 2 kids that’s a total of $500k. This is a huge craze for anyone to swallow, even if you’re pretty successful. Only the very wealthy can afford to be cavalier about such a large figure, and only the very poor qualify for adequate financial aid and don’t have to worry about how they will pay for college.
So the purpose of this podcast is to help you understand how you can afford the high cost of college when you don’t qualify for need-based financial aid. This is an extremely important topic because paying for college is one of the biggest financial challenges you’ll face, just like buying a home and financing retirement.
I invited two experts to back-to-back interviews to share two different perspectives on how to pay for college. The purpose of this podcast episode is to provide a complete education on college for the affluent in an affordable, all-in-one podcast episode.
My first guest is Brad Baldridge, a CFP who specializes in helping middle- and upper-middle-class families pay for college.
My second guest is Jocelyn Paonita, who received more than $126,000 in scholarships to cover tuition and graduate debt-free. He’ll teach you his entire system so he can get enough scholarships to cover his college expenses without borrowing a dime.
In this section you will discover:
- Six different categories of schools and the financial advantages and disadvantages of each.
- Find out why college is just a job like any other; so you can accurately evaluate the costs and benefits of different school offers.
- How can you attend some out-of-state schools with in-state tuition rates?
- Why do you have a better chance of receiving merit aid at a private school than at a public school?
- The critical difference between merit and need-based aid.
- How can your kids get free scholarship money even if they’re not academic or athletic rock stars?
- Take a behind-the-scenes look at universities’ marketing strategies to avoid falling for their tricks.
- How do the bottom 25% of the incoming class pay for the top 25% of students?
- Four aspects of paying for college.
- Here are Brad’s favorite strategies for reducing the burden of paying for college, including business and tax strategies.
- How can you calculate Expected Family Contribution (EFC)?
- What you need to know about the FAFSA and the CSS Profile.
- Why complete the FAFSA and CSS Profile even if you think you’ll never qualify for need-based aid?
- How to use net price calculators (and disadvantages) that universities must provide
- How can you set expectations with your child to avoid running up a big bill?
- Formula for how income and assets are weighted in financial aid calculations.
- How to negotiate with schools to lower tuition or get better aid packages?
- Why is it important to start this process as early as your sophomore year of high school rather than later?
- Jocelyn’s entrepreneurial strategy for generating scholarship income as an alternative to work.
- The entire system Jocelyn uses to win half of the scholarship applications she submits.
- What does it mean to get into the “money-making mindset” before applying for scholarships?
- How can we separate legitimate scholarships from all the scams?
- How to use mathematical expectation principles to choose the most lucrative scholarships?
- The surprising reason why you might want to opt for smaller scholarships over larger scholarships.
- The unfortunate truth about how college financial aid offices handle merit- and need-based scholarships.
- How storytelling and structure are critical to your college essays.
- How to use events and achievements to ‘sell’ a story in an app?
- 529 gaps every parent should know.
- and much more….
Resources and Links Mentioned in This Session:
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