Putting It All Together: Your Financing Plan
You can afford college.
How you will pay for it will depend on how you construct your financing plan. Will you attend school full-time and work part-time? Will you take out student loans? Will your parents be expected to contribute? How will they choose to contribute to your educational costs? Will they borrow, dip into savings, pay out of their current income, or all three?
You don't need to decide the answers to these questions now.
In fact, you won't know exactly what kinds of scholarships and grants you will qualify for until the spring before you plan to attend school. However, you can get a sense now about what your financing plan might look like.
As mentioned above, some colleges and universities have financial aid calculators that you can use to get a sense of how to finance your education.
What follows are some sample financing plans for students in a variety of financial circumstances. These are meant to be illustrative of how students have financed their education in the past and are not a guarantee of your costs or the financial aid for which you may qualify when you attend school.
