“Everyone from Barack Obama to Bill Gates keeps pushing a college 
education as the way to secure one’s economic future.”

But is this idea true or false?

Well, the answer is that it depends.

It is true that statistically on the average college graduates earns more than high school graduates. However, your child is not a statistic. So what is true for most other students may be entirely irrelevant to your child’s situation.

Recently, Yahoo.com featured an article about Kelli Space. Kelli is 23 years old and graduated from Northeastern University in 2009 with a BA in sociology. She also graduated with $200,000 of student loan debt.

Given that the average starting salary for someone who holds a BA in Sociology is about $35,000/year, if she applies $10,000 of her annual salary just to pay her loan, Kelli will spend almost 40 years working full time just to pay off the principal and accrued interest on her college loan.

That means that for most of Kelli’s life she will be carrying around this debt with her. She will bring it with her to her marriage. It will be with her when she gives birth to her children. And when her children grow up and they go off to college, Kelli will still be paying off her student loans.

Of course, all this is assuming her lenders would let her pay only $10,000 a year. What is actually happening that Kelli is expected to pay $1600/month or $19200/year. That means after Kelli pays her loan debt she will have $15,800/year left over to do things like buy food and pay income tax.

How did this happen? How did Kelli get herself into such a financial mess?

The truth is that it is not really Kelli’s fault. True, she is the one who ultimately made the choices that got her to where she is today and she is the one who is going to suffer for those choices. But how old was she when she started on this path? Seventeen? Maybe eighteen?

Kelli’s story is really unfortunate. She entered college full of optimism thinking that this was going to open the future for her. But at seventeen she lacked the experience and foresight to think about the debt she was accruing and what that would mean to her future.

So where were the adults that were supposed to be watching out for her? Well, like most of us, Kelli’s parents believe what Barack Obama and Bill Gates believe. They thought education is the key to success and they wanted their daughter to have the best education possible.

What about Kelli’s school advisers and guidance counselors? Shouldn’t they have had the experience to steer Kelli on the correct path? It seems that looking out for Kelli’s financial future was outside their realm of expertise. It’s not in their job description.

But do you know what is really tragic about Kelli’s story? Two things:

1-Her situation is not unique. In fact, it is quite common. Children are graduating college every year with a debt burden that is going to hamper their lives for decades.

2- What happened to Kelli was entirely preventable.

Had Kelli received the proper advice from someone who really understood the system and all the options available, she would have been instructed on what steps to take to avoid the obvious financial disaster of her current plan.

Kelli had a whole host of options and opportunities that would have protected her without requiring her to pick a cheaper school or a higher paying career. But unfortunately, the adults in her life were not aware of these options. Her parents didn’t know about them. Her teachers had not heard of them. And her guidance counselors were completely unaware of them.

So now Kelli and many college graduates just like her will spend most of their adult lives burdened by the price of a degree that was supposed to give them financial security. Or else they will be forced to default on their loans and ruin their credit for the next decade.

And again, all of this was preventable. That’s what is so sad.

You definitely don’t want this to happen to your child.

If you have a child in high school that you plan to send to college, then I am going to give you the opportunity to protect your child.

Recently, we held a free teleseminar for our community where the nation’s leading college planner. Ron Caruthers, revealed numerous strategies to save money on your child’s college education. The interview lasted 86 minutes.

Ron has agreed to let me broadcast this teleseminar again.

The repeat of the teleseminar will be held two times this week.

Wednesday at 3 PM EST
Thursday at 9 PM EST

The teleseminar is 86 minutes and I will be on the line afterward to answer any questions you might have.

Therefore, if you are interested in learning how you can save thousands of dollars on your child’s education, please sign up below and I will send you the information to get on the call.

Enter your name and email address below:

Related Blogs

When it comes to financing a college education, parents make a lot of mistakes. These mistakes may cost you tens of thousands of dollars a year.

Fact: There are literally billions of dollars available to help you send your child to college.
The trick is how to get some of that.

Here are 3 myths that may be costing your child thousands of dollars.

1- All I need to do is apply: Most parents think that all they need to do is fill out the required forms and if they merit aid they will get it. Big mistake! There will be forms to fill out. But if that is all you do, you will be losing thousands of dollars that should be yours.

2- State Schools and Community Colleges are more affordable: The average private school will cost $47,500 a year. In comparison, the average state school costs about $20,000 a year. Since 4 years of private college costs $110,000 it only makes sense that it is cheaper to send your child to a state college.

Wrong. You can get a financial package to finance most of all your child’s education.

I know of one family that received $50,075 a year to finance their child’s education at Stanford. Their required contribution- $1,700.



Another student, the child of a physician received $44,500 to go to Pepperdine University.

Another student got $46,900 a year to go to Johns Hopkins University. None of this money was a loan and there is nothing the family will need to pay back.

3- I earn too much: Wrong! Wrong! Wrong! The aid you get is not based upon what you earn, but upon what you can show that you need. And once you understand exactly what factors they are looking at and how the whole thing works, you can position yourself to knock thousands of dollars of your bill.

We have only touched on the tip of this topic. But I want you to understand that there is lots of money available to finance your child’s education… If you know how to get it.

And that is our next step; how to get your share of the billions of dollars that is available to you.

Last week we held hosting a teleseminar with the president of the leading college planning company in the United States. Those parents who attended the seminar saw step-by-step what they need to do to save thousands of dollars right now on their child’s education.

This teleseminar was free, but there was only a limited number of lines so most parents were not able to get on this call. Because of this, we have decided to do it all over again to get this information to anyone who was not able to access it the first time around.

If you want your child to go to college and you don’t want to mortgage your home or give your kid $100,000 worth of debt, then you need to be on this call.

Here is what to do next:

We are creating a private notification list for this teleseminar. If you want to be on this list.

Enter your name and email address below:

I expect us to rebroadcast the teleseminar late this week or early next week.

Today I am going to discuss how you get your adolescent or teenager to participate with the family and be part of the family. This is a big problem.

The first thing you must understand is the stage your child is going through. At some point when your child hits adolescence he starts moving away from the family. He is growing up. It is normal for your child to try to become more independent of you and become much more attached to his friends. Growing away from the family is normal. In fact, if your teen is not doing this, it could be a sign of a problem.

More than that, many teens at this age find being with the family and particularly being with you, the parent, to be an embarrassment. They don’t want to be around you. They are embarrassed to be around you in public. Again, this is normal. It is a stage. It is not a reflection of how your child really feels about you.

Teens want to be cool. They want to seem big and being with mommy or daddy just doesn’t work with that image. So if you have a teen at home and he is shying away from being with the family, there is a very good reason for this. Your child really does not want to be with you. He is embarrassed to be with you in public.

However, you are still his parents and he is still part of the family. How do you get him to behave that way?

First of all, we are living in kind of a crazy world right now where there is a breakdown of the family life in general. Family members go in and out of the house at different times. All the kids have different schedules. No one seems to get together at all. This is a big problem and it erodes the closeness of the family. It is a society-wide problem.

What we recommend is to make a fixed family time on a consistent basis. It can be once a week, once a month or some time in between that. It is a time for all family members to spend together and everyone is expected to be there. You can have a family dinner once a week. You can schedule a family night to do something. Make it a requirement that everybody in your family to be there.

That means you have to be there and all the children have to be there. This will give you children the idea that they are part of a family, not just a bunch of individuals who live in the same house.

As you and your children get older these family times will become very pleasant memories. Your children will remember that they are part of a family. This will help your children to remain close as they grow older.

You should not expect these times to run smoothly always. However, like any other time, your children are expected to behave themselves. If your teen acts out because he doesn’t want to be there you give appropriate discipline. Your child may not like it, but he is expected to behave himself and to participate. You should expect some grumbling from time to time. Try to overlook as much as you can. You are building memories.

Our world is moving very, very fast. The family unit is being lost. It is important to have a regular family time. This will help your family stay a family.

Today I want to discuss a common child discipline mistake parents make when giving consequences. This is the mistake of negotiating limits with your child.

Let us take for example a curfew violation. Your child is supposed to be home at 9:00 p.m. on weekday nights. Your child comes in at 10:00 p.m. You start giving your consequence and your child says, “It’s not fair. All my friends come home at 10:00 and I have to come in at 9:00. It’s not fair. I am already 16.”

Then you start defending yourself and why your curfew is fair.

Well…is it true or not true? Are you being fair? Maybe your child should be able to stay out later. But here is the problem.

Consequences are limits. The limit was set at 9:00 p.m. When your child starts negotiating with you about the time, and you start defending your choice, you ignore the fact that your child went over the limit that was set.

There is a time to negotiate curfew or any other limit, but it is not when a violation of that limit has occurred. Also, you don’t change curfew time when your child is out and calls home for permission to stay out later. That is not the time to change limits.

You can and should negotiate limits. You do this when you can have a conversation with your child about that limit. But when a child has violated the limit, that is not the time to talk about it.

The only issue at hand is that a limit was in place, and fair or not fair, your child just violated that limit. You can discuss what is fair at a different time.

This is a common mistake that parents make. They get sidetracked with other issues. They get sucked into discussions of what is fair or not fair and the fact that a limit has been violated gets diluted.

Limits have to be enforced. When your child breaks a limit, your job is to enforce limits, not to negotiate.

This is only one of the mistakes parents make when giving limits and consequences to discipline their children or teens.

I have a video which will show you the #1 mistake parents make in child discipline and when giving consequences. This mistake is the main reason why consequences and discipline do not work.

If you are having trouble with child behavior, you should see this video right away, because it will show you quickly how to change that problem.

The free video is located at http://ccparenting.com/discipline

Today I want to discuss with you child discipline and using consequences to set and enforce limits.

Children need limits. It is very clear they need limits. First of all, children are not mature enough to handle themselves properly in the world. That is why they live at home with you.


A child needs to be told what to do and when to do it, until he develops the maturity to keep himself safe in certain situations.

A child without limits will go out and stay out all night. He will go to dangerous places. He will get involved in dangerous things.

Your job as a parent is to protect your child and keep him out of trouble. One of the ways you do that is by using limits.

How do you enforce these limits? You use child discipline. Consequences are part of an overall child discipline strategy to help you to enforce limits that you set.

Your child will try to test your limits. Believe me, this is normal. Every child tests limits. It is part of growing up.

You need to have a consequence in place to discourage your child from testing your limit and to let him know that your limit is a real barrier.

It is critical your child understands their limits, because the world is full of limits. It is full of things he cannot do. There are rules and boundaries.

For example, your child can’t go onto someone’s property, because he wants something. He can’t take something from other people, because he wants it. He can’t speed in his car, because he wants to. There are limits. It is part of living in society.

Your child has to learn that limits are real, limits are important, and limits are part of getting along with everybody else in the world. You use consequences to teach this lesson.

Many parents find that their consequences are not effective. Often their children don’t seem to care.

I made a video for you which shows the #1 mistake that parents make when giving consequences. This mistake is the main reason their consequences are not effective.

You can get access to this video right away!

Go to:

Child Discipline