One moment you’re in high school trying to get a cute date for the prom, and in the twinkling of an eye you’re trying to puzzle out how to come up with $10,000 to $35,000 you need for your freshman year of college. You are now free to make your personal choices, but most of your choices are limited by money. You are now solely responsible for yourself and you have to pay the consequences if you make bad choices. Wow, life can change quickly.

However, you are not alone if you find yourself having trouble failing to make payment for college. Probably you have never even had to make payments for your car or your Chevron gasoline credit cards before, and now suddenly you have to come up with more money for a year of college than you’ve had in your lifetime. Naturally, you can find some students who come from families with plenty of money for their education and a couple of students who get full scholarships, but many of us get hit by the real world when we become college freshmen.

The best time to start planning money for college is the start of your senior year of high school. Indeed it could be the busiest year of your life trying to balance getting SAT scores for college, getting grades for college, and planning how to finance the college. Unfortunately, the way the system works you will not get many affordable personal student loans, scholarships, or grants unless you begin to apply for as long as you’re still in high school. You have to pay special attention not to miss the deadlines of any application. Your high school guidance counselor need to be your best friend on your senior year. Rely on him or her to a great extent to help you on your financial planning for college. You should do your own research on scholarships, good loans, or grants for college as well. It would help to get a job to help your raise a tiny portion of money for college you need, but you probably won’t have enough time for that if you’re being busy in applying for grants and scholarships.

Having said, your money for college will basically come from yourself, your parents, grants, scholarships, and loans. You have to compete for grants and they are typically very small, but they add up quickly if you go for it and get enough of them. Getting scholarships are like winning the lottery, It’s like a dream come true. Nevertheless, you should apply for the more the better because it is free. Whatever you can’t raise from grants and scholarships will either have to come out of your savings, your lender, and your parents.

You shouldn’t feel bad about borrowing funds for college. Most students need to go this way. The good news is you don’t need to start repayments to get out of debt until you quit going to school. So stay in school until you have an academic degree in whatever you plan to secure a good position.