My husband is supposed to retire in less than a year and is old enough to draw early social security now. There is no way we will be able to afford to take out a home equity loan when our 13 year old is ready for college. We have not been able to save much money for college because our son has medical issues, our house needed expensive repairs last year and our almost 14 year old car needed thousands of dollars of repairs which wiped out the little savings we had, and we live in a rural area where nothing is close to us so that means we have to use a lot of very expensive gas to go anywhere. I am also homeschooling my son and taking care of my elderly dad who lives next door which means I can't go out and get a job. My son will have difficulty working a part time job to help with college expenses because of his medical issues.
I absolutely have to find a way to get my son through college without leaving him in debt. He is saying now that he thinks he shouldn't go to college because of our finances. Because of his disabilities he will not be able to work at any job that requires any kind of physical endurance--even standing for more than 30 minutes is painful.
I don't know if he will be able to take the ACT or SAT that might qualify him for scholarships because he would have difficulty sitting and paying attention for that long in a very uncomfortable brace. There is only one chair in our house that he can sit in comfortably and even then he takes breaks and lies down in bed to get through the pain. If he takes the brace off, he has back pain after about 30 minutes. When you add in the dysgraphia it just looks like it would be very difficult for him to take such a long test.
