Posted by admin on February 28th, 2009 in College, Education, Travel

If like us, your college savings plan has been cut in half by the economic downturn, you’re dreading the ramp-up to college admissions.  When planning for college these days, you almost have to have a “pre-college” budget.  College visits, application fees, testing fees and sometimes tutoring-for-the-testing fees.

A Long Time Ago…It was Much Easier

I know it was a looong time ago, but  in the ’60s and ’70s  ( I’m sure before) if you applied to college you either went to a college nearby or your State University.  In my case, the University of Texas was the only college I applied to.  It was cheap.  The tuition was about $200/semester.  My parents splurged and rented a mini-refrigerator for my dorm room.   Now, I have a daughter that will be attending college in 2 years.  One rainy day, I decided to make a budget of all the items we were going to have to pay for before we even pay for college. Here goes..

College visits (how many? where?, 2 people):  $3000???

PSAT/SAT fees: $100

Application fees (how many colleges?  many kids apply to as many as 10 schools!)   $1000

SAT tutoring (I hope we don’t need this but…) $1500 – $3000

Does this look like your list?  Are you thinking about this?  Everyone talks about saving for college.  Why doesn’t anyone prepare you for these costs?  Granted we don’t have to use an SAT tutor and my daughter may not need or want one but it’s common these days to use one.  Mostly because high school counselors are so over-worked they don’t have time to  prepare kids to take the SAT.

Anything else?  Oh..right, vacation…what’s that?