If you ever want to give yourself anxiety, I mean serious anxiety, try one of these online

calculators for how much money you need to be saving for college.

I've done some of the online calculators to tell me how much I should be saving per month.

At this point in for our daughter, they were suggesting that we save like a thousand dollars,

and it's just not doable.

That's a listener Valerie Finnemeier, and she's right. I mean, saving money for your kids college

for many of us, it can seem like an impossible task. I mean, the sticker price for a four-year

private school is like $200,000 per kid. It's like, uh-huh. How is this even remotely possible?

And if you start late, it's even harder. Take it from me. But don't panic. Back away from the

ledge, saving for college is not easy, but you can probably save a lot more than you think,

especially once you decide, all right, look, this is on. We are going to do this. And you know,

parts of it might even be kind of fun. You can get creative. I'll be honest, I use it as a hammer

for my kids. Like, you don't pick up that shoe, no college fun for you.

And if they were fighting with each other, it's like, I'm going to give your brother your college fun.

This is your NPR life kit for paying for college. This episode had a save money in advance,

so your kids don't have too much student loan debt. I'm Chris Arnold. I cover personal finance

and consumer protection. And we are going to give you seven important things that you need to know

to start squirreling away and investing money in a smart way. So we're going to get into 529

plans of the best-saving strategies. And we even have to pay anything close to that sticker price

anyway. We're going to learn how to do this right. And I promise you that your kids are going to

love you for it right after this.

Okay, so the first thing we're going to do is blow up a myth because blowing up myths is kind

...