I paid a college consultant good money to help our family, and one afternoon I asked her the only question I actually cared about.
"How do we lower what this is going to cost us?"
She waved her hands at me. Physically waved them, across the table, like she was clearing smoke. "Oh no — I don't get into the money part."
I remember sitting there thinking: then who does?
My wife Dana and I have three kids — our oldest, then twins 33 months behind him. Which means that for two straight years, we had three tuition bills landing at the same time. Ordered two, got three delivered. FedEx problem.
We did everything you're supposed to do. We saved for years. We hired a financial planner, a real one, with credentials. And when I asked him how we should approach paying for three college educations, his strategy was: "save more in the 529."
Well. That's not a strategy. That's a savings account with a nicer name.
So we hired the college consultant — an independent educational consultant, sharp, genuinely good at her job. She helped our kids explore majors, build a school list, write essays that sounded like them. Worth every dollar for what she did.
She just wouldn't touch the money.
And that's the thing I want you to see, because it isn't a story about two people who let us down. They were both doing exactly what they were trained to do. There's a canyon running down the middle of this whole industry: the admissions people don't do money, and the money people don't do college. Almost nobody sits in the middle and treats this like the six-figure purchase it plainly is.
Meanwhile my kids were touring campuses. Falling in love with them. And love, as it turns out, does not check the budget.
I spent about a year on it. Half a dozen books. Dozens of webinars, most of them bad. Hundreds of websites. The federal aid formula, which reads like a tax return wrote a poem. The CSS Profile, which is a 1040 on steroids. How merit money actually gets awarded, and to whom. How appeals work, and when they don't. How to spot a school that will be genuinely generous to a family like mine, versus one that just has a very nice quad.
Thirty-two years in software turns out to be decent training for this. My whole career was taking something complicated and building a repeatable process that normal humans could actually run. That's all this was. A harder version, with my own kids' futures as the test case.
Then I ran the play on our family.
We saved more than $40,000. Same kids, schools they were excited about, no raided retirement account. Our twins started as freshmen in 2022 and both graduated this spring, in 2026 — a completed four-year story, not a hopeful projection. And the money we didn't spend is still ours.
I want to be careful here, because this is where people expect the miracle. There wasn't one. There was no loophole, no secret scholarship database, no trick. There was a series of unglamorous decisions made in the right order, early enough to matter.
The realization underneath all of it is embarrassingly simple, and almost nobody says it out loud:
College is a shopping decision.
Not a merit badge. Not a status contest. Not something that happens to your family in April of senior year when the award letters arrive. It's a purchase — likely the second-largest one you'll ever make, after your house — and it's the only major purchase most families make without ever looking seriously at the price first.
Think about how ridiculous that is in any other context. You'd never tour $800,000 houses before a lender told you what you're approved for. You'd get the number first, then shop inside it. But with college we tour first, fall in love second, and find out the price in the spring of senior year — at which point most of the moves that could have saved you real money are already behind you.
So I built the process I couldn't hire. Over time it turned into three pillars, and I call the whole thing the Smart College Shopper Framework.
The Pre-Flight Check. Know what your kiddo actually wants, and what your family can actually afford, before you build a list. That means two numbers on paper: your SAI — the Student Aid Index, what colleges think you can pay — and your College Number, what you truly can pay per year, per kid, without stealing from retirement or hanging a debt anchor on your kid's future. Most families never calculate either one. It is the single most expensive miss in the whole process.
The Generosity Map. Find the schools that will be generous to your family. This is the part that surprises people, because generosity varies wildly for identical families. Two colleges with the same $80,000 sticker price can end up costing you $80,000 apart across four years. Same kid. Same income. Different institutional priorities.
The Closing Playbook. Read the award letters — which are, by design, hard to read. Compare them honestly. Appeal where you have a real case. Then plan the four-year bill, not just the freshman one.
I didn't set out to start a company. I set out to solve my own family's problem.
But once you've built the thing, you start noticing how many people need it. I formed the LLC in 2023 and took my first clients in 2024. Since then I've worked with more than 400 families. This academic year alone, the families I worked with saved over $1 million combined on college.
That number is made of small, specific wins. One appeal letter I wrote took a family's gift aid — free money, not loans — from $27,000 to $55,000. One change to how another family completed their aid forms took them from zero gift aid to $49,217, in year one alone. Neither family had a genius kid or a low income. They had someone in the room who knew where the levers were.
Their words, not mine:
"I just called Carleton. They verbally told me that they increased the Carleton grant from $27K to $55K! Andy and I are in disbelief at the moment so we are waiting to see it in writing." — Kristy M.
"We appealed the offer and received an additional $6,323 in grant money — bringing the grant to almost $69,000 and leaving us with a net cost of a little over $21,000." — Ron K.
I keep the second one close, because $6,323 isn't a headline number. It's one letter, one round of follow-up, and a kid's junior year of college paid for.
Here's the part I'll say even though it costs me business: plenty of families can do a lot of this themselves. The formulas are public. The calculators exist. If you're organized and you start early, you can run your own two numbers and do just fine, and I'll tell you so on a phone call rather than take your money. Some situations are genuinely harder — business owners, split families, anyone facing the CSS Profile — and those are worth a second set of eyes. Most aren't.
The point was never who helps you. The point is that you do it, while the moves are still on the table.
Because here's what's actually at stake, and it isn't really the money. It's whether your kid starts their career free to take a low-paying first job they love, instead of the one that services the loan. It's whether you retire on schedule. It's whether the conversation at your kitchen table in April of senior year is a celebration or a reckoning.
Control the controllables. Start with your numbers.
If you want an honest read on where your family stands right now, I built a scorecard for exactly that. Fifteen questions, about three minutes, and you'll see where you land across the four things that drive what college costs you — plus the one gap worth closing first.
It's not a quiz that tells you you're doing great. It's a diagnostic. Some parents get a score they don't love, and that's the useful part.
Take the College Funding Scorecard → collegefundingcounselor.com/scorecard
No cost, no obligation, no B.S.
Don't walk this path alone.
— Michael