The short answer is that we don't know. And before someone says "what about the 529 prepaid plans?!?!" (which I will discuss in a future article) please keep in mind that those plans only track in state tuition fees and are quite expensive. So bottom line is - we don't know, in fact, I would argue, we can't know. The guiding light of finance being "the future's not our's to see." So I'm going to guess. My guess, assuming our daughter goes out of state for college in 17 years and attends college for 4 years is that our total bill (tuition, fees, room, board, etc.) at the end of her undergraduate education will be $281,000 in 2008 dollars. Oy.

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Now that we have decided to use CollegeSure CDs to save for our daughter's college the question is - how? The answer turns out to be non-trivial in that we need to figure out how many CDs of what duration at what cost to buy each year between now and when she finishes college. After some experimentation I came up with an approach that seems to provide a reasonable cost and purchase plan. Below I explain how the approach works and provide a calculator that creates a purchase plan using the approach. Please keep in mind however that I'm no financial expert, that the code hasn't been properly tested and that objects may be closer than they appear.

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