Husband vs. Wife: Save for College or Retirement?

Most family decisions are made by couples around the kitchen table and when it comes to personal finance, like much else, each side tends to have a different approach. Do you ever have trouble understanding the other side?

In this column, Mr. and Mrs. Fuchs, a real married couple who has never had a fight in all their two decades of marriage (except over money), will articulate their very different approaches.

Between digs, Mr. and Mrs. Fuchs, parents of three children (an 11 year-old daughter and two boys, 7 and 5), offer a window on decisions where family, love and money intersect (and occasionally collide).

This week's round table:  He says, "We will not save for the kids' college education." She says otherwise.

Mr. Fuchs says: Honey sit down, you are going to need to.  Care for a glass of wine?  You might need that too.

Plain and simple: we will not—or, at least, I don’t think we should—save for the kids’ college education.

I know it sounds crazy and counterintuitive, but trust me: It’ll be the best thing we ever did. (Other than get married in the first place.) 

Not that I need to bolster my argument, but I spoke to Michael Kresh, a CFP from Islandia, N.Y., who said, “You can always borrow for college, but you can’t borrow for retirement.” 

See?  We should be saving for retirement.  Not one dime for the kids’ college.

A degree from a halfway decent private college now costs more than $150,000.  Who knows what we’ll be facing when we start writing checks for the class of 2024?  I’m trying to repress the whole thing. Repression, in this case, is good economics.  Say, for argument's sake, that the cost of degrees for all our little geniuses tops out at a combined $1 million. 

Just doing a back of the envelope calculation and assuming a mid to high single digit rate of return (probably too big an assumption these days) we have to save around $2,000 a month.  Worse, we’d have to start saving it when the kids are born, which was a few years ago already.