ORIGINAL DATE: 04/27/2008 10:52:38 PM
It’s All My Fault And I’m Apologizing!
Here is a recent conversation I had with a mom I met at a birthday party for a mutual friend this past weekend in Orange County, CA. After I introduced myself, she wanted to know more about what I did for a living. Being passionate about my work, I spent about 5 minutes telling her how I help college-bound families with cash flow planning, tax capacity and minimizing debt – things she said she had never heard applied to college planning. I then asked her about her family. She told me that their daughter was graduating from UC Davis this summer after 5 years. She told me that her husband had had to postpone retiring because they had accumulated nearly $100,000 in PLUS Loans for the direct college costs as well about $18,000 they had borrowed from their home equity line of credit for the “incidentals” that kept popping up. She had over $1,500 per month payments that were not tax-deductible. She was quiet for a minute and then asked me where I had been for the last 5 years! She was actually angry that she had never heard of people like me. I told her that fee-based college consulting is a very specialized occupation and sadly, very few “players” in the system really know how to help families in the right way.
She informed me that all she ever saw was all about either selling her something (529s, books, insurance, even the colleges) or telling her to borrow (students, parents, home, private loans). She looked for the "free ride", did the FAFSA, read a "free report" on the "9 Secrets" from an insurance salesman, and attended every college night and seminar she could! They spent lots of time searching for scholarships and found about $3,200 all 4 years. I then made a MAJOR mistake. I did some quick mental calculations based on what she had told me and gave her a couple of ideas that would have cut her costs in half. But before I could share some things she could do now, she told me it was MY FAULT she had all that debt and walked away, clearly upset. I was stunned but after thinking about what she had told me, she was absolutely right to be mad! She had never been given the information I had shared! She had told me about all the places she had gone for information – the colleges, the high school, her financial planner, her tax professional, the internet – and got nothing that helped her! I was just a handy target for her anger. Good news is she came back later in the evening and she will be meeting with me to see if there is anything we can do now. Her husband works in law enforcement and he can retire anytime but he is still working because of all their college debt. Good news is there are ideas we can use. Then I got an eMail from Chuck Moore – one of the masters of college financial planning! He had had an almost identical situation with the head of Human Resources at a company where he had been referred! The person he was talking to had massive debt for two children who were out of college and was angry at him for failing to let people like her know they had options! Chuck said it had really made him stop short! He felt it was partially ALL our faults in the college planning field. We were not getting our information out to enough people! No one knew they had options! I hate to keep repeating myself, this confirms that the College Leadership Foundation and their revolutionary College eCoaching Club is the right thing for families NOW. Families who join the Club will have choices and options based on KNOWLEDGE that is unbiased and immediately useful. Visit www.CollegeLeadershipFoundation.org.
