Let me give you the sentence that reframes this whole thing, and then we'll go build your number.
Not the sticker price on the website. Not what a federal formula decides you can pay. What you are willing to pay.
I know how that lands on first read. Willing? We'd pay anything for our kiddo — that's the whole problem. Well, sure. But willingness here isn't a measure of how much you love your kid. It's a budget you set on purpose, in advance, while you can still think straight about it.
Which brings me to your actual job in this process. It's two things, and neither one is what most parents think it is.
Help your student figure out what matters for them to succeed in college. Then find the schools that deliver that at a cost that works for your family.
Fit, and price. That's the job.
The second half of it needs a number. So what's yours?
Nobody can hand it to you — not me, not a calculator, not the college. Because your College Number isn't a fact waiting to be looked up. It's a decision your family makes.
That's the part that trips people up. We're all used to money questions having answers somewhere out there. What's my credit limit, what's my 401(k) balance, what will the bank lend me. Somebody else computes it and tells you. This one doesn't work that way.
Your College Number is the most your family can pay, per year, per kiddo, without breaking your retirement plan. And you're the one who sets it.
When I was ten, maybe twelve, my dad took me along to buy a car.
Gosh, it was boring. Hours of it. The sales rep would write a number on a slip of paper, slide it across, and then stand up and say, "Let me go ask my manager." And off he'd go. Again.
Somewhere in the third or fourth round of that, my dad leaned over to me and said, "You have to know your walk-away price, Michael."
I had no idea what he meant. I was a kid in a chair, waiting to go home. It took me another couple of decades to understand what he'd handed me — and by then I was using it on houses, on job offers, on what a thing is worth to me versus what someone would like me to pay for it.
Serious bidders decide their walk-away number before they ever walk in.
College is the same negotiation, with one difference that makes it harder. The pressure doesn't come from a sales rep with a manager in the back. It comes from someone you love, sitting right next to you, who has already fallen for the place.
Which is exactly why you set the number before you're in the room. If you don't, you'll set it in April of senior year with the award letter on the table and your kiddo looking at you. And you will talk yourself up. Every single time. Ten thousand more, fine. We'll figure it out.
So do this in the fall of sophomore year, or junior year, or honestly today — whenever you're reading this — while it's still arithmetic instead of a feeling.
Three wrong answers I hear constantly.
It's not what's in the 529. That balance is a down payment, not the purchase price. More on the math in a minute, because it's usually smaller than it looks.
It's not sticker price minus financial aid. That's what a school will charge you. It has nothing to do with what your family can sustainably pay. Those two numbers meet in the middle later — that's the whole negotiation — but they are not the same number.
It's not what your brother-in-law paid for his kid three years ago. Different income, different assets, different school, different year, different kid. Gosh, I wish this one worked. It would save everybody a lot of time.
Get a legal pad. Four lines.
1. The cash flow you're actually willing to redirect. Not the theoretical maximum if you cancel every vacation and eat rice for four years. What you'll really move out of your monthly budget, month after month, for as many years as you have kids in school. Be honest here or the whole number is fiction.
2. Your college savings, divided by years of college, divided by kids. This is the line that surprises people. That 529 looks a lot smaller once you spread it across two kiddos and eight total years of school.
3. A reasonable amount of borrowing. And here's where I push back on people, because this number is almost always smaller than they assume. Parent PLUS loans are easy to get and hard to live with.
Two things about PLUS changed on July 1 of this year, and most parents haven't caught up yet. There's a cap now — $20,000 a year per kiddo, $65,000 total — where before you could borrow all the way up to the cost of attendance. And any PLUS loan taken out on or after July 1, 2026 has exactly one repayment plan available: a tiered standard plan, ten to twenty-five years. No income-driven option if your situation changes. No Public Service Loan Forgiveness.
What didn't change: nobody checks whether the payment actually fits your budget. There's a credit check, and that's it. So the loan will keep saying yes long after your budget has started saying no. Pick a borrowing figure you'd be comfortable saying out loud to a friend, and don't make college payments in your late 60s.
4. What your kiddo chips in. Summer earnings, work-study, a modest student loan. Define "modest" honestly. A kiddo should have skin in the game, not a mortgage.
Add the four lines. That's your number.
Made-up family, real math, so you can see the shape of it.
Two kids, two years apart. They decide they can move $1,200 a month out of the budget — that's $14,400 a year. They've got $88,000 in the 529, split across two kiddos and four years each, which comes to $11,000 a year. Parent borrowing: they talk it through and land on zero. Their kiddo will cover about $4,000 between a summer job and work-study.
$14,400 plus $11,000 plus $0 plus $4,000.
Call it $29,000 a year.
Now look at what that one figure does. Every school with a net price under $29,000 is on the list. Every school above it has to earn its way down there — bigger merit award, a successful appeal, something real — or it doesn't make the list. Not because the school is bad. Because it doesn't fit the budget, and you knew that in sophomore year instead of April of senior year.
A family I worked with last year landed at $55,000 a year. Higher than most, and it was still the right number for them — two solid incomes and years of disciplined saving behind it.
The reason I bring them up: their $55,000 didn't come from a calculator. It came from four lines on a legal pad, and a conversation between two spouses that took about an hour and probably should have happened years earlier. That conversation is the deliverable. The number is just what you write at the bottom.
And I'll say the thing that costs me business: you do not need me for this part. The four inputs are the four inputs. Plenty of families sit down at the kitchen table, run their own number, and do just fine. Where it gets genuinely hard is the other number — what colleges think you can pay — and what to do when the two don't match. That's a later post.
For now, one assignment.
Write it down. One figure, per year, per kiddo. Put it somewhere you'll see it before the next campus tour.
College only costs what you're willing to pay. That number is you deciding what you're willing to pay, on purpose, ahead of time, instead of in a hallway in April.
Control the controllables. This is the first one.
If you want an honest read on where your family stands right now — not just this number, but all four things that drive what college costs you — I built a scorecard for exactly that. Fifteen questions, about three minutes.
Take the College Funding Scorecard → collegefundingcounselor.com/scorecard
It's a diagnostic, not a quiz that tells you you're doing great. Some parents get a score they don't love. That's the useful part.
Don't walk this path alone.
— Michael