If you are a parent, I am going to bet that one of your biggest financial concerns is how you are going to pay for college. I know, because since becoming a financial advisor with a large wealth-management firm in 2001, I have met with hundreds of parents between the ages of 45 and 60 — happy, successful, dreaming of retirement — and scared to death about how they would afford to send their children to school.

What amazed me was that most of these parents were making the same mistake. What they had saved was often tucked away in three places: Qualified retirement plans, equity in their homes, and in some cases, their businesses. While these may seem like good vehicles for long-term planning, they don’t actually provide parents with the liquidity or cash-flow needed to cover four years of tuition at most four-year schools.

As I began to investigate better college funding strategies for my clients, I realized there was an incredible amount of information available on the topic that all parents needed to have. That’s when I created an adult education seminar called Little-Known Secrets of Paying for College. I now travel around the country teaching families the rules of the game so they can be prepared when it was time to pay that college tuition bill.

I invite you to peruse this website. You’ll meet some of my partners (pictured above) and find useful information and tools that will help you understand how to maximize your cash flow — while minimizing out-of-pocket costs. I also invite you to sign up for an upcoming class. If your city isn’t on the list, send me a note and we’ll work to arrange it: bjolly@finsvcs.com. Here’s to helping you find ways to send your kids to college without going broke.

By Brock Jolly
The College Funding Coach

For most high school graduates, a college education has become an expectation, rather than an option. For many families, the exorbitant cost of higher education has made paying for this rite of passage more like a PhD in microeconomics.

The good news is that there is a solution. As a financial advisor, I see many families with varying degrees of wealth. The majority of these families have their money in two places — their home equity and their qualified retirement plans, including IRAs and 401(k) plans.

When it comes time to pay for college, neither of these two resources is particularly liquid. In many cases, the family finances look great for retirement; but parents still have to get over the hurdle of paying for college education for their children at a cost of $20,000 to $40,000, and for exclusive private schools that amount can hit $60,000 per child, per year.

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WTOP — On a recent episode of the WTOP radio show “Blueprint for Wealth,” host and estate planning and business planning lawyer Wayne Zell interviewed College Funding Coach Brock Jolly about his trademark approach, “Little-Know Secrets of Paying for College.”

Zell asked the million dollar question: “What do you tell people who don’t have enough disposable income pay for college?”

Brock explained: “The work that we do is assess whether a family for qualify for aid, and if so we want them to qualify for as much as possible. It depends on the school, and the earlier that families start working through this process, the better off they are going to be.” Click here to listen to the entire WTOP interview with Wayne Zell and Brock Jolly.

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