Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, the show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge,

skills, insight and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now while

building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less.

My guest today is Brad Baldridge from the website, Podcast, Business, called Taming

the High Cost of College.com.

And Brad, do you think that children and paying for

children's college is antithetical to financial independence or do you think that you can

work out a plan where these two things can coexist?

I think most families need to figure it out, whether they like to or not.

Welcome to the show, sir. I'm glad you're here.

Yeah, I'm glad to be here.

So we're going to talk about college, which is a hot topic, and we're going to try to give as much detailed information as possible, some real meat from my audience, some ideas, both mainstream ideas and some off-beat ideas.

But I'd like to start with your background.

You come from the financial planning world and you've approached this as a financial planning specialty.

How did you wind up becoming an expert in the area of college planning?

Well, I started like most financial planners and I worked with just about anybody and everybody,

and I realized that I started resonating with parents and one of their big concerns was

college and retirement and as I learned more and worked on it harder, I realize that there's a huge need for families to really understand college as it gets more and more expensive in order to do it and do it well so that you don't mess up mom and dad's retirement, I guess, in general.

How long have you been practicing in this area?

I've been a financial planner for about 20 years and about 10 years ago I started

specializing and actually launched a couple of businesses around college

planning. So let's start with the changes. Have cultural attitude toward college and college planning in the last decade

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