College Planning Calculators
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College Investment Asset Allocator

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Why We're Better

Only our college planners use a superior Monte Carlo simulation methodology (most don't have it at all).

There are two college planners: The single college planner is for one student, and the multiple version is for analyzing up to five students at once.

You can also run the analysis if they're already in college, afterwards, and see the difference between public vs. private colleges. You can also see the difference in the savings amounts needed with a Section 529 Qualified Tuition Plan vs. just saving in a taxable account.

You Just Input

· Basic factors like the student's name, current age, age student will start college, how many years in college, etc.

· Total cost (in today's dollars), and how much will be paid out-of-pocket during college. The total cost is accounted for in a detailed monthly student budget. You can ignore all of the details, and just input total estimated monthly expenses.

The student budget section is the most functional of any college planning software ever, because it has the most expense items, you can set a different inflation rate for each expense. Then you can manually override them all in every year.

· How much you have saved now, and how much you plan to save.

· Assumed rates of return, inflation, and taxes. You can have different growth rate in every year.

Then look at the results. It has great year-by-year charts that show how much more is needed to graduate on schedule. If there are deficits (the student won't have enough money to make it through college), then it shows how much, in both lump sum or monthly payments, is needed now to fully fund everything (both 529 Plan and non-qualified).

College Planner Features

· It shows you just about every number in every year to help you understand how everything works.

· It allows you to account for out-of-pocket funds that will be used to pay for college while the student is in college. Out-of-pocket funds will typically come from loans, grants, gifts, family giving money from their checking accounts, students working, etc.

The difference between the costs of college and what will be paid out-of-pocket is what the program uses to calculate the amount of money that needs to be saved in the investment fund.

· It displays all of the figures for comparing public vs. private colleges at the same time. Everything was just copied, so the only difference between the two scenarios is the increased costs of attending a private college.

This is also very useful when comparing the budgets of different colleges. You don't have to be limited to only comparing public vs. private college costs here; you can also compare living at home vs. dorm, or any other scenario.

This is the only college calculator that does all of this so you can see the details of both colleges, or modes of living, at the same time.

· Since it's an Excel spreadsheet, you can run and save an unlimited number of versions to compare all of the different scenarios.

· You can have a different rate of return for the accumulation phase and the payout phase. Usually you want to take less risk when the student is actually in college, so you can enter a lower rate of return in the manual override columns for years you want to be more conservative. You can even simulate losing money in down market years.

· You set the rate of return used to calculate the additional funding needed. This can be a different rate of return so you can be more conservative or aggressive than in your regular investments.

· You can set an annual expense inflation factor for each expense individually. These can be different for each student. Also, if you think a particular year will have negative college inflation (where tuition is on sale or something), you can also use the manual overrides to reduce total expenses in any year. You can only do that with this college funding tool.

· You can control savings, investment growth, and withdrawals down the dollar in every year by using the manual overrides. Both the public and the private college calculators have separate manual overrides for complete control.

For example, you can manually override the contributions (additions to the investment account) to account for unequal cash flows in any year, even during and after college. And you can input things like trips to Europe while going to a U.S.-based college, while comparing that to attending college in Europe. This is the only college funding planner that will do any of this.

· For financial professionals, it summarizes everything on the presentation sheet for a nice, simple, clean bottom-line client presentation.

· You can see how much to save using both Section 529 Plans and non-qualified tuition savings plans.

· You can use a surplus in one student's account to fund a deficit in another's.

· It has an additional two sheets to do investment portfolio asset allocation for college funding too. No other college funding calculator has this, and this sells for about the same price as the college planner all by itself. Check out the awesome investment portfolio returns! Yes, you can use both this asset allocator, and the asset allocation models, to save for college too. The minimum initial investment needed to buy all of the mutual funds in the model portfolios is $20,000.

· It summarizes everything in text/numbers and then has several charts and graphs to show all of the pertinent information. There are too many features to list here with all of the charts, please see the demo.

· The cash flows can be integrated into other modules of the financial plan software (retirement, cash flow, life insurance needs, net worth, etc.)

· The program can be used for other things other than college planning. Any time there is a need for a limited series of annual payments in the future, this will work.

Please note that this college plan software does not compute or determine eligibility for 529 plans, student loans, or grants. There is also no database of estimate costs of attending any college. They change too much and are easily found online.

To download the non-functional demo, right click on the link below, then choose "Save (Target) As..." to save to a folder on your hard drive. Then open it with MS Excel. Sometimes the WPP's server doesn't work well with weird browsers, or it just may not work if it's not configured right. Plus you won't be able to print well from your browser. Please send e-mail if you have any problems, and it will be sent to you. Answers to frequently asked demo questions, and how to use demos.

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