How Parents Can Pay for College Without Going Broke
The Mike Litton Experience
Mike Litton
5.0 • 1.2K Ratings
🗓️ 16 December 2025
⏱️ 63 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
College costs are exploding—and too many families are sacrificing their future to pay for it.
In this powerful episode of The Mike Litton Experience, Mike Litton sits down with Paul Compeau, Certified Financial Planner
and college funding strategist, to uncover the truth about paying for college without destroying retirement, taking on massive debt, or making costly mistakes.
Paul shares his personal journey, from growing up in Michigan to building a national practice that helps families strategically plan for college using financial aid optimization, right-fit school selection, and long-term wealth planning. You’ll learn why most families are unprepared, why 529 plans are often misunderstood, and how parents—even with limited savings—can still create a winning college plan.
This episode is a must-watch for:
• Parents of middle school & high school students
• Families worried about student loan debt
• Anyone planning for college AND retirement
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | If you borrow money for college, then you can't retire on time. |
| 0:03.7 | Right. |
| 0:03.9 | You have to pay for that borrowed money, right? |
| 0:06.7 | And it's not the kids borrowing the money. |
| 0:08.4 | It's the parents who borrow the majority of the money. |
| 0:11.2 | I mentioned that the 401k at work doesn't count against you. |
| 0:14.6 | But if we put all the money you have into that 401k at work, you can't pay the college bill, |
| 0:19.5 | right? |
| 0:20.1 | So we're balancing all of that within that |
| 0:22.8 | financial planning to make sure that we have that blueprint, the year by year, how that bill is |
| 0:27.4 | going to get. We don't want them spending a fifth and a sixth year in college because you know |
| 0:32.3 | what that one extra semester cost. Most families don't realize that the scholarships they got for |
| 0:36.6 | the first four years don't |
| 0:37.7 | extend to the fifth and sixth year. So not only our mom and dad now having to come up with an extra |
| 0:42.8 | 50 or $150,000 for those extra year or two, they're also the kids not earning income. So if you can |
| 0:51.6 | sell a higher ticket item, you can work with better people or more |
| 0:54.8 | affluent people, then you can make more money and work less hours. And that's kind of what I was |
| 0:59.3 | looking for over time. So don't hear that wrong. We work with mainly middle class families and |
| 1:05.0 | everything like that. But yeah, it's really grown into a great career where I have the team since my kids were born. |
| 1:13.1 | Did you know there's a technology that's actually an app on your phone that uses sound waves to tell your brain what you want your brain to do? |
| 1:20.6 | We had a young man that was a guest on our podcast, the Michael Lidon experience, who had a traumatic brain injury. |
| 1:26.6 | He was sleeping three hours |
... |
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