Posted by: Jennifer Chang
Many parents of teenagers are facing a financial dilemma: paying for their children's college tuition bills during the same years they should be shoring up their retirement accounts. Randi Mayer, 51, of Riverwoods, Ill., is currently prioritizing college savings. Mayer's 19-year-old older son attends a public university, and her 17-year-old son is considering public colleges as well. "Since college for us is more immediate at this point, probably a little bit more goes toward the college fund than towards the retirement fund," says Mayer, whose father financed her undergraduate degree. "I feel like college is now and it will be a while until we retire."
"For more and more people, these two big needs, retirement and paying for college, are happening at exactly the same time," says Greg Dosmann, 46, a principal with financial services firm Edward Jones. His own youngest child is 13. Less than a third (29 percent) of parents are saving equally for retirement and their child's college education, according to a telephone survey of 1,497 adults conducted recently by Opinion Research Corp. and Edward Jones. Among parents who can't afford to save for both, more respondents said they're saving only for retirement (22 percent) rather than just their child's college education (9 percent). And 26 percent of parents aren't saving for either.... Click here to read more...
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