With all due respect to Bruce... Never pay for your kids college cost. Sure, help them with some rent or whatever, but every financial advisor will tell you to take care of yourself first. The kids have their whole life to pay for college; we only have a finite time to pay for retirement.
Again, not to say you made the wrong decision at all Bruce, just that for most people it is not a good decision. We have some friends that worked just "normal" worker bee jobs. They paid for their kids college. Not sure when they are going to retire...
My parents didn't pay for anything nor was there any support. I clawed my way up in life. It is a pure miracle that I got to where I ended up.
Many schools of thought. My dad put himself through college by joining the Marine Corp for the GI bill. His dad didn't help him at all. I also have a co-worker who grew up in a family of 8 kids. Everyone knew what they were getting for their 18th birthday: Luggage to move out the next day regardless if they were in high school or not.
My parents paid for my school though I offered. I worked a part-time job while in school and made really good money programming on a TRS-80 computer (Google "Bruce Hansen TRS-80"). My tuition at community college was a whopping $11 - $13 per credit hour. Michigan State University was a whopping $29.50 - $33 a credit hour. We were on terms, not semesters, so multiply by 1.5 to get the semester rate. I also co-op'd at GM while at MSU and recall getting take-home checks of $466.06 twice a month. I'd get 13 checks a year which would easily cover my ~$500 tuition per term. On top of that, I had an academic scholarship for $250 a term or around half-tuition. Annual tuition at MSU was around $2000 a year including books. My 1981 Cutlass Supreme with every option cost $10,400, paid cash for it when I was 21.
My dad said he'd didn't have a problem paying my tuition as long as I got good grades and was pursuing an employable curriculum. He was also strict about NOT being a party animal. He figured my job was school. If I wasn't blowing my money, he'd cover my school.
We're fortunate that our kids understand and appreciate what we are doing/did for them. Our daughter's undergrad was at a $35K per year school. She got her Bachelors in Business Administration with a specialty in international business in 3 years. Then went on to law school at Wayne State University at around $55K per year including living expenses. That would have been over $250K in debt if she'd have covered it on her own. She understood that we didn't pay for C's or lower and never had a bill to pay. My wife and I make pretty good money, and with no house payment, really nice 401K, etc. etc. etc. could pay those bills and still have our bank account go up. The cost of college has gotten insane: 5 years of school in my day was the cost of a very nice new car. Now they are equal.
We've been lucky that we didn't have to show any "tough love". I had a co-worker whose son took 7 years to get a Bachelors; he was a party animal and failed a number of classes. The kid ended up doing okay, but blew a lot of my co-workers money.
The big help for us was dumping money in our 401K while raising our kids, and in my case, having a pension from my employer. We have never carried debt on a credit card and explained the math to our kids early on. Does it seem "fair" that the bank will give you a penny for every dollar you save with them over a year, but charge you 20 cents to borrow a dollar? Scr#w them, I don't need anything that badly! If we couldn't pay cash, we didn't buy it (other than our house).
To your point, we did take care of ourselves for retirement at the same time. Financial advisors will tell you a rough rule of thumb is to have 10 times your salary in your 401K to be comfortable in retirement. Yes, kind of bragging, but we're at over 20 times my salary, closer to 25. We don't want for anything and can afford to help our kids out as long as we don't feel like they're taking advantage of us. We figure they're eventually going to get it anyhow, might as well help them out while they're young so they have some funds to enjoy while in their 20's and 30's instead of getting just their college debt paid off (like another house payment) when they're in their 40's.
Bruce
