SecondCor521
Give me a museum and I'll fill it. (Picasso) Give me a forum ...
My main thrust for this post was to find out how parents who retired when kids are in school deal with the large uncertainty of the cost of school. [...] Thoughts?
I would suspect you would find quite a variety of answers on this, just as there is quite a variety on how families handle college expenses in general, irrespective of FIRE.
Personally, I decided to FIRE when I had a FIRE stash that was 25x my actual expenses and a college stash that covered 4 years of tuition/room/board/books/transportation/fees for each of my three kids. My FIRE date coincided with my oldest having finished basically a year of college, and having a high school sophomore and freshman.
I have two detailed documents. The first is my college deal that I have made with my kids, saying what the "contract" is - I'll only pay if they get decent grades, etc. The second is a list of ways to pay for college; this is prioritized by how I plan to pay for stuff.
Maybe I'll have enough, maybe I won't. If there is extra, I have a plan for how to distribute the extra once all three have finished their degrees. If I come up short, I have contingency plans for that, which involved dipping into my FIRE stash and going back to work if needed.
I think other people solve the problem by saying there is $X in your college fund, when it runs out I guess you're on your own. That's a reasonable approach, I think. But in my case since I retired pretty early (age 46) and my parents put me through college, I would rather go back to work, having accepted the fact that I rolled the dice a little and it simply didn't work out.
In the meantime, I am monitoring as they go along, making sure that we spend what we have prudently, adjusting as things happen, and keeping them up to date on how well things are funded. Currently things are on a good glide slope, but it will depend a lot on how the current senior's college offers come in. If I do come up short, it should only be a semester or two.