Financial Help for Homeschooling Families?

Posted on October 19, 2018 by Barbara Frank

Despite what some people might think, homeschooling isn’t cheap. You can start out with used books and inexpensive materials when your children are young, but as they grow, you need more expensive books to teach subjects like algebra. If you choose to use a distance education program, your costs will be even higher.

Some of our governmental representatives are trying to help homeschooling parents with these expenses by proposing educational savings accounts that can be used to save money (tax-free) to be used for homeschooling expenses. As former senator and presidential candidate Ron Paul says:

This provision will help homeschooling families and inspire more families to consider homeschooling. Homeschooling parents must not only pay for all their children’s education expenses, they also must subsidize government schools via property taxes and other taxes. A commitment to homeschooling may also require a parent to limit or even forgo outside employment.

Forgo outside employment, indeed! Living on one income is a daily challenge for many homeschooling families. Let’s hope this bill passes; every little bit helps.

How Schools Help Turn Children into Coddled Young Adults

Posted on September 28, 2018 by Barbara Frank

People are complaining that the milennials won’t grow up, and in many cases they’re right. But who’s at fault? Their parents for coddling them, and the schools for treating teens like children.

This article points out what limited freedom today’s teens have. Even working is seen as inferior to going to school. Back in the 1970s, teens who didn’t want to go to college could go to school until noon and then leave for work. Now, if they work, they’re dragged back to the waste of time that is modern high school. Never mind that those first few jobs get young people on the road to eventually supporting themselves by giving them a taste of earning their own money.

While you’re there, scroll down and check out the chart in that same article, the chart showing the growth in students, teacher and administrators since 1950. There hasn’t even been 100% growth in the number of students, but we’ve gained 252% in the number of teachers, and a whopping 702% in the number of administrators.

Clearly public education has become a cash cow for many people, while preparing teens for adulthood takes a back seat. Savvy parents will put their teens’ needs first and help them get ready for adulthood without waiting for permission from the school, while homeschooling parents have the freedom to make the teen years a launching pad into adulthood, which is as it should be.

(Prepare your teen for adulthood with my book, Life Prep for Homeschooled Teenagers, now available in an expanded third edition, and also newly released as an eBook.)

The Anti-College Chorus Grows Louder

Posted on July 13, 2018 by Barbara Frank

In my book Thriving in the 21^st Century, I argue that the pursuit of a college degree should no longer be the default position assigned to teens as soon as they graduate from high school. I’m happy to say that I’m hearing more people who share that opinion speaking out.

One of them is John Stossel, who recently interviewed college professor and economist Bryan Caplan about his recent book on the subject. I highly recommend both of these links to parents who are considering borrowing tens of thousands of dollars so their offspring can earn a college degree because they think it’s the only way they’ll ever get a job. I suspect this chorus will only grow louder as more time passes and tuition keeps rising.

Millennials Having Trouble Leaving the Nest?

Posted on May 29, 2017 by Barb

Here’s yet another story about the current crop of young people and their inability to live on their own. The lousy economy is surely a factor, but you have to wonder how much helicopter parenting has contributed to this problem. So many modern parents are unwilling to help their teens achieve independence by transferring responsibilities to them as they approach 18 (which used to be the age of independence).

We didn’t raise our kids that way. Once they finished homeschooling, they could either go to college or go to work, but if they chose work, they also had to start paying rent. We didn’t charge that much, though I do recall one of them accusing us of wanting to get rich off of them, LOL. But today they’re all self-supporting, independent, hard-working adults despite being part of the millennial generation.

I can’t help but worry that many of the young folks featured in the article will never successfully make it on their own. I sure hope I’m wrong.

Should You Co-sign Your Teen’s Student Loans?

Posted on May 26, 2017 by Barb

These days, most people don’t have enough money saved up for a college education for their child because college has become so ridiculously expensive. Instead, they encourage their offspring to apply for financial aid, which includes grants and loans.

Grants are great, but generally hard to obtain in more than a nominal amount; hence the popularity of loans. But since young people just out of high school (or home school) rarely have a financial track record, their parents are often asked to co-sign loans, especially if the total annual cost of the chosen college is more than several thousand dollars a year.

Should you co-sign your teen’s student loans? If you’re a Christian, you need to be aware that the Bible, while not specifically prohibiting co-signing loans, makes it clear that it is foolish to do so.

Check out Proverbs 17:18 (KJV):

A man void of understanding striketh hands, and becometh surety in the presence of his friend.

Surety, in case you’re wondering, is pledging to repay a loan without any sure way to pay it back. Co-signing means you’re taking on that obligation for someone else in case they can’t pay it back. The reason the bank requires them to have a co-signer is because it considers them a bad risk.

It’s possible to borrow money but avoid surety. For instance, if you get a car loan and use the car as collateral, you can sell it and repay the loan if you have to. If you obtain a mortgage and use the house you’re buying as collateral, you can sell it and use the proceeds to pay off the mortgage.

But if you pledge to pay your child’s student loans back if they can’t, what do you have to use as collateral? Nothing. Now you’ve plunged yourself into surety, and according to the verse above, have become “void of understanding,” or lacking in good sense, according to other Biblical translations.

To make matters worse, by co-signing a loan for your own child, you have also obligated him or her to extensive debt for which they have no collateral.

Why would this displease God? Larry Burkett explained this in his book, Using Your Money Wisely:

Obviously, surety is not a biblical law— it is a principle. A principle is a biblical guide to keep you on God’s path and out of the world’s traps. You don’t get punished for violating a principle unknowingly; you suffer the consequences. The consequences of violating the principle of surety is that you presume upon the future. In other words, when you sign surety for a debt, you pledge your future. If you have omniscient insights into the future, then there is really no danger. But, since only God has omniscient insight, when you sign surety, you presume upon God’s will.

So if you’re a Christian, you should not co-sign college loans for your teen. Trust me, refusing to do so will not make you popular with your teen or possibly others in your family or social circle. But as Christians, we know that obedience to God trumps the approval of man.

How can you help prepare your teen for the future without co-signing student loans? Well, you could have saved up over the years so you could just give them the money. If that didn’t happen, you can help them research scholarships and grants.

Another option: seriously consider whether your teen even needs to go to college. In homeschooling circles, sending kids off to college has been a way to prove that homeschooling works, so there’s always been a lot of pressure to do so. But the U.S. already has an overabundance of college grads who can’t find work in their field. Do you want your teen to end up in that boat?

In the updated and expanded third edition of Life Prep for Homeschooled Teenagers, available for purchase at all online and brick-and-mortar book sellers and from Cardamom Publishers on June 1, you can learn how to determine if your teen is college material and whether it’s worth sending him or her to college in the first place. Stay tuned for more information!