College planning and retirement planning go hand in hand. As someone who has helped clients with their retirement plans for over 30 years, I like to think I know what I’m doing.

A subset of retirement planning is college planning or college funding. I’ve discovered that you can’t offer one without impacting the other. Typically parents of college age children are reaching their peak earning years and retirement is looming beyond their children’s college education.

There is enormous pressure on families to find the money necessary to pay for their children’s college education. And that pressure in increasing as State governments deal with budget cuts. While the markets have done well over the last 24 plus months, incomes have suffered. One solution has been to invade funds set aside for retirement, like IRA’s and 401(k)’s and 403(b)’s. This is before-tax money accumulating as a pot of money from which to draw when you decided to stop working. Or are forced to.

If you are a parent of a student in high school, you will find some answers here. If you’re a typical parent, my hope and expectation is that you very much want to send your child out into the world with a college education. Obviously, they have to do the work, but in the normal course of things, you see the financial burden as your responsibility. What you will find here is a process you can follow that will allow you to fulfill that responsibility without a total compromise of the funding necessary to your ultimate retirement.

In every post there will be a link to a presentation I created that lasts less than EIGHT MINUTES OF YOUR TIME. It will give you the necessary insight to begin the process. Here’s the link: http://portal.sliderocket.com/ALSXE/CollegeMoney