If you had to decide between saving for your children’s college fund or saving for your retirement, you might be tempted to pick college fund first. I think the main reason for that is because retirement is always such a nebulous concept anyway whereas school is very concrete, so people opt to fund something they know they will use, especially if they have children bouncing around the house. However, this decision is a bad one because while you can often get cheap loans for education (and tax benefits), you can’t get loans for specifically for retirement.
Retirement is funny like that, you put all this money in that you can’t realize until much later, so it’s difficult to pound away at your 401k balance when you’re struggling to pay for college right? While it’s hard, you should still do it in that order.
Source: Yahoo Finance