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I have been reading guides about financing college and graduate school for over 30 years (from just shortly after my first child was born). In all that time, I failed to find a single book that provided an total overview of how to develop a strategy for financing higher education regardless of how close or how far away one was from having children in college and graduate school until Taming the Tuition Tiger came alone. I was delighted to read this book, and got several valuable ideas from it that I did not know about before (despite having finished financing three children through graduate school). That's a good thing, too, because our youngest child just accepted the college of her choice last week . . . and will start in the fall. Developing financial resources for higher education is more complicated than ever. There are more ways to get help, but the conditions are tricky. Use one tax credit, and you lose another one. Take money from the wrong account, and you may be hit with a tax penalty. Taming the Tuition Tiger is intended to start the ball rolling, before you read all of those excellent books about savings plans, scholarships, loans, work-study, and so forth. I would advise anyone who is a parent or grandparent of a prospective college student to read this book as soon as possible. The book will not only help you focus your attention on where you will be most successful in financing college and graduate school, the book also points you towards the excellent specialized resources that will help you implement in the areas of your choice. A great strength of this book is that it encompasses advice for all people (grandparents, parents, step-parents, aunts and uncles, and the children themselves), in all situations (marital status, different financial circumstances, different income levels), and different durations away from higher education (from future unborn children to children about to enroll). The book is masterful is customizing its advice as simply as one possibly could! As someone who is familiar with tax planning, I was most impressed with the many discussions of how one possible approach compares to another in economic value. Unless you have top CPA available to you who is tax savvy, this is better advice than you will probably get anywhere else. The book also covers the whole gamut from saving money (start at a community college and transfer if it doesn't much matter where you go, or studying online), to earning money (work-study programs), to finding unusual scholarships (using online search techniques for free), to filling out the need-based financial aid applications (with samples in the book), to comparing different methods of saving and investing money before college begins. If you don't save at least $1,000 by reading and following the advice in this book, you didn't pay attention to the material in it. Naturally, it's best to start saving long before a child is born. But for many people that's not realistic. The book even shows you how to handle any gaps in savings with low cost loans, and ways to get parts of those loans subsidized . . . or even forgiven. With the resources in this guide, I believe that anyone can find a way to finance a college education. So what are you waiting for?
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