re: Should parents supports their kids in college?

I'd help as much as I can until they graduate college. Nobody deserves to be buried in debt upon graduation.

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Is this serious? May I ask how old you are?

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Based upon the intelligence of his post, I would say about 11.

My parents help put me through LSU. I didn't learn shite, worked 25-30 hours a week to pay for my beer and gas and got a useless degree.

Couple years later I went back, put myself through it for a much more advanced degree, worked full time with other odd jobs to pay for it and learned so much more. Not to mention the part of me that valued the education I was paying for myself.

I plan to give my kids a small monthly allowance, but everything is on them. Loans, working, or anything they choose to do is fine, but I want my kids to earn it.

If Eli plays his cards right I will be buying a house where he goes to school so that he can learn to be a landlord while staying rent free somewhere. I think it will be a good lesson for him on managing property.

I didn't get crap, so my kid ain't getting crap

my dad did it for me, so i have and will continue to do it for mine.

I plan to provide whatever my children need to get through college. That way they can focus on schoolwork and not waiting tables or bar tending to make rent. Plus they can focus on jobs and internships that will help them in their career instead of a job that will get them a quick buck. I know far too many people who were in college for way longer than 4 years because they spent more energy on bar tending or something than school.

My parents paid pretty much everything for me and I turned out fine. Because of their sacrifice I do better financially than either one of them. I hope to be able to do that for my children as well.

My wife's parents didn't pay a dime. She still turned out fine, but we are paying off a hefty student loan bill.

Now I do know parents who pay for everything and the kid just uses his college years to party and whatnot. If my kid isn't keeping up his grades, they are getting cut off.

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TigerTroll11

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Solid reasoning there. Paying for your kids education is the single best thing you can do to ensure their financial success.

If I had to pay for my education I would have missed many investment opportunities as I would have had to be paying back debt, not investing in my future.

I had full TOPS at LSU so there were no expenses there, and then $30k for 1 year of grad school at a different university, so assume I lived on $15k each year, made $7.5k each summer, that would equal a total debt load of $75k at graduation from graduate school.

That is $75k not going into 401k, not going towards a house, not going into a brokerage account, and not going into any private investments. So I would be in a much worse off spot.

I get where you are coming from, but if I wouldn't have tried thinking I was completely grown and not been a hard head and accepted some help, I wouldn't have spread myself so thin and wore myself out and possibly done better in that phase of my life

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I wouldn't have spread myself so thin and wore myself out and possibly done better in that phase of my life

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it helped that I had a full paid scholarship...so the only real expenses I had were living expenses (food, gas, beer, etc), which I would get by working 100 hour weeks during the summer

I plan on helping my children. My daughter has a college account set up for her.