In 2015, CollegeAdvantage celebrated its 25th anniversary. In honor of this milestone, many longtime account owners shared their Saving Stories and how using CollegeAdvantage helped them achieve their goals. We are fortunate to have these encouraging stories of how families prioritized their children’s higher education and are sharing them again.
CollegeAdvantage helped us make our children’s dreams come true. Shortly, after our children were born, we enrolled in the program. It was a struggle to put back money each year for two children. We scrimped on vacations by taking a cooler and eating our breakfast and lunch from the cooler. We had a budget that included payments to CollegeAdvantage and we stuck to it. We prioritized the payments as our monthly living expenses.
I could continue with many hardship stories of trying to make the payments but the point is we decided that making the payments were more important than eating out, cable T.V., etc. Everyone needs to determine what they can do without in order to save for the future. We decided we would cover the first four years of college for our children, so that was our target goal to save.
When both of our children graduated from high school, many of our friends were worried about paying for their child’s college. That was one less headache for us. Both children received some scholarship funding which helped to stretch the CollegeAdvantage funds. Both received their undergraduate degrees from The Ohio State University. In addition to our savings and the scholarships, but children also ended up with some student loan debt.
Our son enjoyed an internship program with Ajax Toco where he worked summers and Christmas breaks. The one year that the economy was so bad that Ajax was unable to hire him for a summer job he worked at The Ohio State University as a painter. Our daughter enjoyed a job on campus in the maintenance department as a clerk. She started at 7:00 A.M. in the morning before her classes and worked around her class schedule. These funds helped cover their living expenses and incidentals.
Our son studied engineering physics and during his last quarter at OSU he accepted a position with Ajax Toco as an engineer where he still works today. Our daughter received her undergrad in Psychology from OSU and went on to Kent State University to receive a master in Public Health. She worked a year for Americorp and part time for Oriana House and Neomed. She is now the Health Educator at the Trumbull County Health Department.
We are so proud of both of our children and are so glad our family made the sacrifices to provide them finances for their college education.
Vicki Amerine
Vienna, Ohio
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