Retired And Still Saving After 25 Years

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. 

It is amazing how just a modest amount of savings per month grows over the years. My husband and I started a savings program when our children started third grade. This savings supplemented the tuition for both of our daughters as they continued their education after graduating from high school.

Our oldest daughter attended SAA (School of Advertising Art) and graduated with a graphics art degree. The college savings plan paid for her art supplies and books. She is the senior graphic designer at Oberweis Dairy in the Chicago area.

Our other daughter used the college savings money for music supplies and books to help her with the music education degree she received at The Ohio State University. She is teaching orchestra in the Allen school district in Texas.

We saw how a modest college savings plan greatly helped our children and decided to continue a savings program for all of our grandchildren when they too began their 3^rd grade year of school.

Our oldest grandchild has recently graduated from high school and plans on attending a trade school in carpentry. The second grandchild just started 3^rdgrade, and we recently opened an account for him. We have two more grandchildren, ages 4 and 2. Plans are still set to begin their savings program when they reach third grade.

My husband is a retired school administrator, and I am a retired school instrumental music teacher. Since we have always budgeted every month for someone’s college savings program for the past 25 years, it has become part of our budget and is not a financial burden as one would think. With being on retirement pay, we still can put aside a small monthly amount that will continue to help our extended family.

The CollegeAdvantage program has and continues to invest our money wisely. We are fortunate that this program sees beyond the present and into the future for the wellbeing of our children and grandchildren.

Michael L. and Joanne Shaffer

Dayton, Ohio