College Planner
The College Planner allows you to analyze your situation with regards to saving for your child's college education. The planner allows you to compute one of the following variables while allowing you to modify the others:

Initial Savings   Click this button to figure out how much savings you need to start with to reach your goal.
  For example, you may want to know 'how much should I start with if I want my 8 year old child to attend a college, which today costs $20,000 a year, and I can make monthly contributions of $200 into an account that will pay 8% per year?'
Monthly Savings   To figure out how much you need to save monthly, you can choose to compute the monthly savings amount by clicking this button.
  For example, you may want to know 'how much should I contribute monthly into an account that will pay 8% per year, if annual costs for my 8 year old to attend college are $20,000, and I can afford to invest $8,000 right now?'
Annual Return   Click this button to figure out how much annualized interest your investment account should return for you to be able to reach your goal.
  For example, you may want to know 'how much should my investment account earn for me to reach my goal of sending my 8 year old child to a 4 year college that costs $20,000 per year, if I start with $8,000 and can contribute up to $300 every month?'
Time to College   To figure out how many years you need to invest to reach your goal, you can click this button.
  For example, you may want to know 'how many years will you need to invest an initial amount of $8,000 and a monthly contribution of $300 into an account that pays an interest of 8% per year, to be able to send your 8 year old to a $20,000 a year college?'
Annual Cost Today   When you click this button, the calculator figures out how much you will have to spend annually for college, based on what values you entered for the other 4 variables.
  For example, you may want to know 'in today's dollars, how much can I afford to spend for my 8-year-old's college costs if I deposit $10,000 now and contribute $500 monthly for 10 years into an account that I know will average 10% annually?'
     
Assumptions built into the calculator which you can control are the inflation rate and the number of years your child with spend in college.

Inflation   Use this slider to set the inflation rate you expect over the next years through the end of your child's college years.

You want to know how much more money you will need to save if inflation goes up 1%.

Years in College   This slider allows you to explore what will happen if your child spends more or fewer years in college than you'd originally planned.

What happens if my child becomes a professional student and spends 5 years in college?

     

Once you choose a variable to compute, you can then click the diamond shaped sliders next to any of the other variables and drag them to the left or right to an appropriate value to get immediate answers for any number of 'What If' questions. However, if you want to enter an exact value for a variable and the sliders are unable to provide this, you may click the edit field and enter the exact value.

The answers are a mouse click away and appear in the results window at the bottom.