Saving For Education?

[Nancy Machaj]

Im wondering what people are doing about saving for education for their kids.
My kids are 5 and 1, so they'd benefit from the magic of interest accrual if we started investing and saving now. But I have no idea if they'll choose school or anything that we could use the money for (if we chose specific education savings accts like the 529 or Coverdale acct)

Of course, we could just save money, but there are tax benefits to the other ones. Im considering the coverdale, because it appears to be very flexible about what you can spend the money on and you can also transfer it to another child if the current beneficiary doesnt use it or want it.

anyway, what are yall doing????

Nancy
(totally committed radical unschooling mom!)

[Bonnie]

For something that's an open question, you'll usually get more responses if you post in the forum. A lot of people seem to skip over the blog posts.

I don't know much about these kind of accounts. What happens if neither child decides to go to college? Do you lose the money then? If so you'd probably be better off just saving in a regular savings account. Remember your goal is to save for "education", and for unschoolers that can mean a lot of other things besides just college. They might decide they want to play an expensive musical instrument, or take years and years of art classes, or travel abroad, or start their own business, or any number of awesome things where it would be really helpful to have some money saved up. (Of course any child might decide to do one of these things, but unschoolers are probably more likely to.) And of course there's always the possibility of financial hard times, well before your kids reach college age, where you could be forced to choose between dipping into the savings or giving up unschooling. Unschooling can get more expensive as your kids get older, depending what their dreams and goals are, and you'd probably be way better off with savings you can use any way you might need to. Because there is always a good chance neither of your kids will choose college (or they might choose trade school or community college which is very inexpensive and can often be covered by grants) and if that happens, you'll really wish you had that money for something else.