Renée Hirshfield didn’t expect to tap her retirement account to pay for her daughter’s college tuition. But when she opened the bill for Sarah’s junior year at Mount Holyoke College, sticker shock set in.

“She had been getting a fair amount of financial aid, but there had been a slight spike in my income the year before,” says Hirshfield, a small business owner in St. Louis. “That pushed the formula for my expected share of the bill to about double what it had been before. I was blindsided.”

The financial stress pushed Hirshfield to liquidate a variety of investments and savings to cover Sarah’s junior year, including a $3,000 Individual Retirement Account. That put Hirshfield among a growing subset of families tapping retirement accounts to fund soaring tuition bills in the midst of the toughest economic climate since the Great Depression.

Read the full story in my post this week at Reuters.com.

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4. Recession prompts more Americans to crack retirement nest eggs
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Tags | 401(k), planning, Reuters, saving