Come this fall, parents with children attending college will be receiving tuition bills, and chances are many of those bills will have a funding gap that is too often difficult for the parents to close.

The problem is, usually by this time parents have set aside a planned amount for college, which means that the savings account has already been tapped, scholarships have been exhausted and donations have been depleted.

So what’s a parent to do?

No need to panic. There are financing options available to get you through. The question, however, is this: Which loan option is best?

Beth Walker is all too familiar with this scenario. Walker, a financial advisor and the founder of the Center for College Solutions, a coalition committed to making college an affordable reality for all families, cautions clients not to get locked into the mind-set that college can be paid for using only certain tools.

“That’s killing us as parents,” she said. “The financial institutions have done a marvelous job of convincing us that these are our only options, and that’s not true,” she added.

Indeed, parents have voiced concerns that college counselors are quick to steer them to a Parent PLUS Loan or a private parent loan. But don’t buy into it, Walker said.

She said parents should understand that college is like any other major capital purchase—anything we buy that we can’t pay for fully with monthly cash flows.

“Historically, that’s been houses and cars,” she said.

And because the cost of college today is almost as much as it would be to buy another house, Walker said the job of a parent is to evaluate which financing options are as cash-flow efficient and tax-efficient as possible.

And oftentimes, Walker said, when looking for the most cash-flow-efficient option, a Parent PLUS Loan may be ranked third, fourth or fifth. That’s because it has a 10-year amortization schedule and a 4% origination fee, and it’s pretty high-interest at 7% or 8%, depending on the rate and the year.

“So that can really be a high hurdle from a cash-flow perspective. It’s like buying a luxury vehicle every year for four years,” she said.

The more efficient financing option might be a home equity line of credit, Walker explained. “It’s an interest-only loan, and when the kids are out school, you continue to pay on your first mortgage, so your equity continues to go up because you are paying down that primary mortgage and then you are renting the cash flow only at interest,” she said.

So from a cash-flow perspective, that’s a more attractive financing option, she said.

Another attractive financing option is tapping into a whole life insurance policy, Walker said. “Families may have [a long time ago] bought a whole life insurance policy, and they may not realize that they can also get interest-only loans by collateralizing the cash value in their life-insurance policies,” she said, noting that this option is even more flexible than a home equity line of credit because you already qualified when you put the contract in place.

Walker said that if she had to rank financing options, permanent life insurance would be at the top, followed by the home equity line of credit. The Parent PLUS Loan, she said, might be ranked third since a borrower has 10 years to pay it back whereas a 401(k) allows for only a five-year payback.

As for a private loan, Walker said it’s worth canvassing the marketplace for one. But she noted that Parent PLUS Loans have some benefits that private loans don’t—for instance, if the parent dies or becomes disabled, the PLUS loan debt would be discharged.

Walker said that since college is a six-figure investment, parents should be thinking about three things: financing most of the cost themselves; finding the most cost-effective financing options available; and knowing how to use their entire financial picture to create the cash flow for this very short-term period.

Financial advisors, too, should get these points across to parents. “Every financial advisor should act like a mortgage broker when it comes to financing college, because if you are going to finance it, let’s make sure that you can repay the loan,” she said.

“You should know where the money is coming from and what that’s going to cost you and make sure you are in a position to handle those payments until the last kid is out of college,” Walker said.

The overriding thing she would say to parents, she said: “This is the hardest thing that they have to do. They need to set aside their heart as a parent and put on their consumer mind-set, and evaluate this as if they are buying a house or a car.”