My youngest daughter is 4 this year. Hopefully, she'll start college in the year 2022.  I have a college savings plan, but I haven't been paying nearly as much attention to it as I should be.

How did I realize this, you wonder? Today, I was reading on the internet that in the year 2020, the average college education will cost $31,000 and elite schools may cost upwards of $70,000.  It's important to me that my children have every opportunity available to them when it comes to education, so a college saving account is an absolute must for me.

When my daughter was very young, I became a single mom and I didn't make a lot of money. At the time, I wasn't thinking long-term, so starting a college savings plan wasn't important to me. I made the incorrect assumption that I would always be poor, so my daughter would be eligible for federal financial aid. 

Don't be like me and sell yourself short with self-limiting thoughts like that! Even if you don't make much now, you are a smart and successful person, the fact that you are reading about a college education for your child proves that! Your income may very well be much higher by the time your children reach college age, which means that you may not qualify for federal funding by the time your child reaches college age.

Start saving now, open a college saving account as soon as you can. Even if you can only saving a small amount at a time, it's a good thing to do.  If you could manage to save $3,000 a year from the time your child is an infant, you would have $148,000 by the time your child reached college at 11% interest. Let's get a little more conservative. Let's say you can only invest $1,000 a year for 18 years and you only get 7.5% interest.  You'd still have $42,000 by the time your child was ready to head off to college.  

And, just to put that into persective, $1,000 a year comes out to only $83 a month. If things are tight at your house, that may seem like a lot of money, but I bet if you really looked at what you spend your money on, you could find a way to save it. I have friends that waitress one or two nights a week to save for their kids college educations. At a good restaurant, you could pull a couple hundred a shift and really increase your childs college savings plan.