(MONEY Magazine) – Kevin and Deborah Winne are giving their children -- Sara, 12, Jaime, 10, and Kaitlyn, 2 -- the kind of idyllic upbringing that seems more characteristic of the Father Knows Best era than the Married with Children '90s. Their three- bedroom home in Beaver County, Pa. is on a peaceful road that leads into an 80-acre dairy farm. Sara and Jaime (pronounced Jay-mee) attend top-quality public schools, and Deborah, 38, spends her time caring for baby Kaitlyn. The family goes to the Concord United Methodist Church every Sunday and piles into the 1985 Buick for vacations. Although the Winnes live comfortably on the $58,800 salary Kevin, 41, earns as a project manager at a consulting engineering firm, they worry about one thing. ''My biggest financial concern is being able to pay for the kids' college education,'' says Kevin. The first bills to arrive will be for Sara and Jaime, Deborah's children from her first marriage, which ended seven years ago in divorce. Sara, who will graduate from high school in 1996, is an excellent math student. Jaime, who will be ready for college in nine years, wants to be a minister. The Winnes say their kids are probably headed for either Penn State, which now costs $7,558 a year, or Geneva College, a nearby Christian liberal arts school that costs $11,000 annually. The family has a good chance of qualifying for financial aid, at least during the year when both Sara and Jaime will be in college. At MONEY's request, Gary Warren, a financial planner at Price Waterhouse in Pittsburgh, assessed the Winnes' finances, given two different goals: sending all three kids to private schools, and sending them to publics. Either way, he concluded, the Winnes must start doing some serious saving. The couple should realize $20,000 in the near future from the sale of a two- bedroom house that was Deborah's during her first marriage. Warren recommends that they invest the $20,000 in zero-coupon municipal bonds set to mature at a value of $32,637 when Sara is in her junior year of college; those bonds offer a 0.2% yield advantage over similar ones maturing in her freshman year. ''They can get AAA-rated, insured Pennsylvania school bond issues that will yield around 6.5%, which is equivalent to a 9.03% taxable equivalent return,'' says Warren. ''They're not going to beat that in a taxable bond, plus they will have the comfort of knowing exactly how much they'll have at maturity.'' Warren next advises the Winnes to begin making monthly contributions to a stock fund. Since half of their total $109,000 retirement and emergency savings is in money-market or fixed-income investments, they need to balance their holdings by putting their education fund into equities. Warren calculates that the Winnes must invest $412 a month in a stock fund earning an average of 10% annually to pay the full cost of sending all three kids to a public school like Penn State, or $657 monthly to afford Geneva or a similar private college. He figures they can count on at least a 10% average annual return over the long term from funds of the type MONEY categorizes as All Weather -- those that tend to underperform growth funds in bull markets but suffer smaller losses when the stock market slumps. Top All-Weather performers include Financial Industrial Income (no load; 800-525-8085), with a five-year compound annual return of 17.3%, and Vanguard Wellington (no load; 800-662-7447), with a five-year annual return of 13.6%. Deborah and Kevin recognize the need to invest in mutual funds, although they are concerned about the risk. But even after trimming expenses and redirecting some of the $400 a month Kevin puts in a savings account for home repairs and emergencies, they can set aside no more than $400 a month for education. But that does not mean private schools are out of reach. Since Geneva is only a 20-minute drive from their home, the Winnes say if Jaime or one of the other kids is set on attending, he or she could live at home and commute. Cutting out room and board would put Geneva's current cost at $7,100 -- about the same as total costs at Penn State.