Pants-Free Parenting: Ways parents can pay for college

My husband is a planner. Our first Halloween in our house as I prepared for our first round of trick-or-treaters, he handed me a spreadsheet with the instructions to mark how many trick-or-treaters came in half-hour increments. I was also supposed to mark how many pieces of candy I handed out every half hour. His plan was to, over the years, track key trick-or-treater data and then predict precisely how much candy I should buy each year and how much he should budget for it.

That plan didn't work out well. And not only because of my poor data collection skills, but because Dave failed to leave a spot in the spreadsheet for how much candy he ate. In sum, a lot.

So, when I say my husband is a planner, I don't mean that we have general plans for our future. I mean, that there is a spreadsheet that outlines how many children we will have, the next 30 years of vacations and how specifically we are going to pay for college. I assume there are more, but I'm not allowed to see them because I have a tendency to flip my lid when I see that we are supposed to vacation in Michigan in 2018 and no one asked me. It's not that I have anything against Michigan, it's just that I don't want to so easily rule out the possibility of Hawaii, which is in 2030 apparently.

But despite all of this planning, like every American family, we are having trouble saving for college. The rising cost of college combined with relatively slow rise in wages and the fact that as a writer, people often try to pay me in feelings, is making college saving a bit of a struggle.

Not to be outmatched by my husband, I have come up with my own list of possible ways to send our children to college. Here are just a few of them, feel free to use them.

Sell one child into indentured servitude and use the money to pay for the other's college. Because I am not a monster, we will fairly decide who gets sold and who gets a chance in life, by keeping a running tally of who wins the most at Candy Land.

After watching a series of cop dramas based in L.A., I decided that another reasonable way to solve this would be to, at some point in their teens, lock them in a shipping container for 24-hours with a bunch of knives. Whoever emerges the victor gets college.

At one point, I thought I would sell all my daughter's 'Frozen” accessories on eBay and put that money in the college account. But my husband pointed out, I would probably just use it on whiskey and he is correct, but feel free to go ahead and use that idea. I mean, they might need the money for therapy instead of college, but at least you saved.

Or maybe they don't get to go to college. Maybe I'll just take that money and we can go to Hawaii in 2018.

l Lyz Lenz is a writer, mother of two and hater of pants. Email her at eclenz@gmail.com or find her writing at LyzLenz.com.