If you have a student who is entering college during the next year, hopefully you have been putting money aside for several years in anticipation of this event. Now is the time for you to determine how to access that money to make it go a little further.

Most schools require that tuition be paid before classes begin in August. You need to examine your overall college savings portfolio and decide how much you will need to cover the first tuition installment. If your money is in the stock market you will need to pay attention for an upswing to pull your money out and take your profit. But depending on the financial vehicles you have selected the following list can help you stretch your dollars a bit farther:

Sell zero coupon bonds intended to pay tuition. Hopefully they will be maturing at the time you need them.

Examine your mutual funds and sell off the poorest performers from the last three years.

On individual stocks, sell any your broker downgrades or any that have significantly lower projected earnings.

If you own stocks that pay dividends be sure that if the dividends are increasing, so is the share price. If you have a stock where only the dividends are going up, sell it.

Now that you have liquidated parts of your overall college-savings portfolio, it is recommended that you put your money into a money market account or short-term certificates. Money market accounts allow for near-CD earnings rates, but provide you the flexibility of accessing your money when you need to for tuition payments and other expenses.

If you have a larger nest egg to start out with, you might choose to lock some of it up into short-term certificates to increase your yield before you need to access the money. With certificate terms as short as 90-days, you can add up some earnings even during a semester.

By liquidating the lowest producing parts of your portfolio, you give the stronger parts more time to grow before the next tuition payment is due. And by setting up a money market account you have a convenient place to realize additional gains on your money and get your college student's bills paid on time.

Source: Some material from How to Stretch your Funds for College, by Adriane Berg, MSN.com

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