how to get into college and pay for it with scholarships, grants and loans
Mom Pays for College
I, Lana Hawkins, am a mom with two awesome daughters. One is almost ready for college, well in two years, but that is just around the corner. The other will follow her so I will be facing at least eight continuous years of funding college expenses.
I've made this blog to share with you information I've found regarding paying for college. Unless your kid will be getting a full scholarship to the college or their choice I know there is going to be some pain involved with finding money and picking the right school, plus probably so many other things.
I just read a great book by Timothy Ferriss called The 4-Hour Workweek. It’s a must for any person who wants more say in their life. The ideas are different than usual. Instead of dreaming up ways to cram so much more into your life Ferriss recommends eliminating a lot. Read it for yourself.
So you’d really need a lot of help to get to this point. I’d need a lot of housekeeping help, help with dinners and someone to clean up after all my pets. So if you are only working 4 hours a week, you are really going to have a lot of extra time.
I’d probably end up working more because I like to work. Maybe I could then work on things that were more interesting than home maintenance and chores. If you like what you are doing, is it work? Not sure.
I have noticed though than when I check my email lees or later in the day I get more done. When I go on vacation and take my computer along I hardly ever check the email. Of course then there is a huge pile of it when you finally log on again.
One thing I used to do at work is file a week worth of email into a folder. Then after another week passed I’d delete the whole thing. I did have a sort for direct emails from my bosses though. But there were only a few of them and that is manageable.
One thing he teaches is to stop looking at email all the time. It’s fairly addictive in my opinion. Save time – Ditch your email to become more productive.
Regarding work and life most people fit into one of these four categories:
(1)No time, and no money.
If you are an employee, chances are this describes the way you feel. You can’t go shopping on a Tuesday afternoon or tell your boss to take a hike. How will you even be able to afford to send your kids to college, save for retirement or even think of having a life today with no time and no money? You want time and money right?
(2)No time, lots of money.
Some “successful” self-employed, professionals and small business owners are in this category. They are slightly better off than the employee because they earn more, but they have to work even harder than employees to keep up with the diminishing profit margins, competition and servicing their customers. As a single mother, do you want to spend much less time with your kids?
(3)Lots of time, no money.
A lot of farmers, villagers, college dropouts or bums have lots of time but no money. Maybe ignorance is bliss, but without a stable source of income, how long can you last many days forward? If you’re a single mom, you know that your kids will need food, clothes plus medical care for that broken arm or leg. Not a great place to be in my opinion.
(4)Lots of both time money.
It is the category that big business owners, landlords, investors are in. Imagine, not having to work for money, but having money to work for you by investing them and earning profits by using your money to make money. Also, you’re smart enough to hire the best people so you don’t even have to work. Just think about how many people you could help out in the no time, no money category A lot of people like it there.
Here are Two Questions for You
Which one of the four categories best describes your current situation?
Which one category would give you the most opportunity to be a great single mother?
If you answered with time and money you’re the kind of person that stands a chance of getting there. Because as Henry Ford put it “If you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re right.”
Yes you can do anything you want and with the internet and all the information and services readily available there is every reason a determined single mom could be in the time and money category rather quickly.
Trading Time to Make Money for College – employees, self-employed
Manifesting & Using Creative Ideas – inventors, artists, programmers
Leveraging resources and other people – business people, leaders, systems
Let’s focus on leveraging your talents. Anybody can get a job. It’s what most of us were taught and all we know. Stepping outside the box we can try new ways of living.
If you are a professional, have you ever explored writing an e-book about your field of expertise? If well written, it could provide a new income stream, instead of you selling out your time serving your clients. The effect is leveraged once you build your automatic system for making the transaction and advertising.
You can repeat the process each time you create new information products.After time you could build a membership site and offer all of your great products and ideas to loyal customers that will pay a small monthly fee to have access to your great information.
How about a computer programmer? You can come out with your own revolutionary product instead of selling your ideas to the company you work for. How about making a small utility program that helps out internet entrepreneurs? You could design an easy to use program that generates friends in multiple Web 2.0 sites.
How about real estate, instead of selling houses, you can pool financial sources to buy houses cheap, increase their value and sell them off at a higher price. It just takes a little time and research to find good ideas and locations. And watch the market so you can time your purchases for gain, not loss.
Is money a problem? Seek out loans if you can take the risk. Pool money from many investors or seek a grant. The sky is the limit when it comes to making money.
Sometimes your credit card company will offer short term, no interest loans for about 6 months.This might be a great way to generate short term cash for a specific project. However, do not take this offer is you are not able to pay it off before the due date.The interest penalty is usually huge and defeats the purpose of making money.
So once you’ve decided on a way to have time and money then you are free to explore the creative ideas category to its fullest.You’ll have the time and money to do it.
Life is pretty darn short. And your kids grow up quickly. I don’t know about you but I want to live my life now and when I’m 65 ½. If you are looking you will find ways to join the having time and money crown, the new rich. See you there! You need to make money for college and life in general.
Thank goodness I have health insurance! This is fresh in my mind. My oldest daughter broke her leg a few day ago warming up for a soccer game. We are still waiting to get into the orthopedic surgeon for the next steps. We did make it to the emergency room for X-rays right away and her leg is in a splint. So I was thinking about just how fortunate our circumstances are and that probably many are not as fortunate.
The three things that seem important to me right now regarding my daughter’s situation are:
Good Health Insurance
1. Excellent heath insurance
Right now she’s covered on her father’s plan. Lucky for us I picked a good guy to be divorced from. Her plan even covers prescriptions, paid in full. I know that some of you don’t have health coverage. I pay for my personal coverage. I am so grateful that I can buy the healthcare that I need. You need to take care of yourself these days. Never get in the position of relying on some one else or some government plan to cover you. The principles I teach about paying for your child’s college tuition apply in paying for your own health care too.
2. Time to take care of my daughter
Since I am my own boss, I don’t have to ask for time off from work. I don’t have to feel guilty about leaving early for work or taking the day off to spend with my injured kid because I work when I want to. I can be there in an emergency if required. How cool is that? I am so grateful for this. This could work for you too. I highly recommend finding a way to make that work. Time is so limited and it’s all you’ve got.
3. A child with a positive attitude
You could come up with a million reasons to be irritated about this situation, and my daughter could probably come up with more since it’s her leg. But she is so amazing! Of course she was extremely disappointed about missing her chance to compete at Nationals in climbing this year (and who knows, maybe she still can) but she’s being very cheerful and just wants her leg to heal up properly. I am so grateful that I have raised a well balanced daughter who is keeping such a positive attitude through all of this. She’s decorated her crutches and is thinking about the color for her cast. Nice! I think I’d be a grouch if it happened to me.
Be thankful for what you have. And figure out how to get what you need. Life is too short to be suffering if you can avoid it. Get a good health insurance plan because it can really help when you least expect it.
I’m a single mom with two awesome daughters.One will be going to college in two years, the other in six. I think every parent struggles with responsibility issues with their kids. Yes I want my kids to grow up to be very responsible adults. I know that letting them have and solve their own problems is key to that development. However they are not really capable of funding college tuition at this time, are they?
Responsible Kids Pay for College?
I also know that too much responsibility at too early an age can result in some seriously messed up choices. I’m living proof. As a young kid I was faced with some serious issues for which I had no prior experience, knowledge or judgment. In addition to that there were no caring adults to help me along through the process. It’s a good Oprah story and I won’t go into details here.
However, as a result of that, I declared that my kids would NEVER have to face any of the horrifying challenges that I did as a young kid.My kids are going to get the best treatment I can give them.I’m not going to overprotect them either, but the level of responsibility will be commensurate with their age or personal development level. So that leads me to paying for college.
When I graduated from high school I got a summer job at the place my dad worked. My dad said he’d buy my books if I paid the tuition and I’d live at home. I was able to save enough money at that summer job to pay for most of my tuition and then got a job during the winter break to pay for the rest.
Well if my kid did the same she’d have to earn over $35 per hour working 40 hours per week. People with serious college degrees make that much or less. That is totally ridiculous to expect that a high school grad could do that. I’d be willing to bet that there are a few who have done this but it’s not the norm.
One might make the argument that “that’s life” and you have to work with the reality. Yes, but no. No, I can’t take that reality as my answer. As much as I thought that I would be the “hard guy” mom and make my kids suffer the way I did and do things the way I did, I realized that this thinking is pointless.Just because I had to pay my way through school (when it was a lot easier back then) doesn’t mean my kids have to.
Just because I suffered at the malicious hands of manipulating adults doesn’t mean my kids have to. No way. I’d like to think that this generation can gain from the mistakes and the knowledge of the last generation. That’s what advancement of society is all about isn’t it? Well yes it is for me and I expect many other single moms will agree that they want their kid’s lives to be better than theirs.
Update on How My Daughter is Funding College Tuition
She got a scholarship to Johns Hopkins University that pays for about half of her college tuition, and boarding. How’s that for a kid funding college tuition?
If you’re like I was, a single mom with kids approaching college or possibly in college, you know the pain and frustration of trying to figure out how to send your kids to the best possible college they can get into and then paying for it. My oldest has big ideas, probably got it from her mom, about going to Harvard. She can probably get accepted, she’s a smart kid.But do you know what it costs to send your kid to Harvard? I’m going to need a lot of cash for college.
What Is the Cost for College?
Well I didn’t know exactly so I Googled it. For an undergrad degree it costs about $45,000 a year. And for four years of medical school it is around $450,000. They say to think of college as an investment.If you invested that amount of money for four years at 7.5% you’d yield about $209,000. Sink that into an investment that earns 7.5% and after 40 years you’d have close to $3,700,000 dollars. That’s right. Now that’s an investment.
How much money is your kid going to make in a lifetime after you or your kid invests $200k over four years? Hopefully it’s more than $4M. Plus also remember that if you borrow that kind of money you are going to have added interest expenses to go along with that.
OK. OK. Not that many people go to Harvard or expensive schools like that. But even a public college costs somewhere around $23,000 per year for a resident, and $44,000 per year for out of state or non-resident.These numbers are from the University of Michigan undergrad program and include tuition, room and board, books and other expenses. Holy Cow!
How Will You Pay Back Cash for College?
No matter who pays for this, you or your kid, it’s a huge chunk of money by most people’s standards. If you pay for it and you don’t have the money already saved, it means working more hours, leveraging your home or borrowing the money and paying it back. This could put a serious crimp in your lifestyle or plans to retire.
Well I’m faced with this reality. I want my kids to go to college. I think that education is valuable regardless of what you earn because of it. I also want to avoid loading up myself or my kids with a huge debt if I don’t need to.Yes we will research scholarships.I’m pretty sure their dad will contribute, but some single moms aren’t in that situation. They are totally on their own.
It seems a shame to work so hard to get your kids ready for college only to find out that the costs are prohibitive. Well I never take no for an answer when it’s really important. I’ve been looking all over the place for ways to fund my kid’s college and earn some serious chunks of cash. I figure I’ll need roughly $4,000 per month for every year one kid is an undergrad. The way my kids are spaced out, that will amount to eight years of $4,000 per month, close to $400,000.
Well there is a way to fund your child’s education, if you start now, and I found it.You’re not going to make that kind of money instantly but after a while that extra $5,000 a month will go on autopilot. How sweet will that be! No more worrying about tuition when you find cash for college.
A lot of people like it there.
