By: Revanche

Having a think about the 529(s), savings for kids, and the future

July 2, 2025

This Ask the grumpies: How much to put in a 529 redux has me kicking around numbers a bit.

We’ve saved maybe 1-2 years worth of undergrad at an expensive school per kid or maybe 4 years worth of undergrad at a lower priced state school. I frontloaded a large lump sum of savings for JB back when they were born.

When they were 2, thanks to a commonsense hipcheck from Nicole and Maggie, I switched to saving for retirement in a brokerage since I didn’t have a 401K and had missed a decade of retirement savings by that point. No tax benefits but the brokerage was the next best thing when the choice was between saving and not saving. I maxed out our Roth IRA for several years but stopped when cashflow tightened up. The thinking was that our incomes in retirement, and therefore our taxes, aren’t likely to be higher than our highest earning years – our tax rate now is probably higher now than it would be in retirement. But who knows! We can only make our best guesses and hope for the best.

I’ve been putting most cash gifts into the one 529. I also keep a separate savings account for cash for them both to be split equally as well, and have been debating when I split the one 529 into two. Maybe if I split it now when it’s reasonably even, it’ll reduce my math / accounting requirements later.

We’re in between the pole positions, financially. We’re not low income but we also couldn’t afford any $100k/year university.

We’re having some conversations with JB about the kinds of thinking they need to put into the decision of which school to go to, and it will need to extend beyond “bestie is going there”.

They asked about vocational schools like cooking school and about university like Stanford (their uncle is affiliated) and there are so many considerations for each of the things they suggested. We talked about each a little bit, and about how they also have to balance more practical considerations like the cost of the school and what kinds of jobs and salaries they could get after graduating from each of those schools. If they want to be able to pay their bills after school, they have to consider how much their loans would cost, if they spend more than they have in their 529.

They also need to consider what broad types of work could be fulfilling. I mentioned that job satisfaction can come from lots of things about the job. Not everything about a job will be fulfilling, it IS work after all, but if you have enough big/small things, that’s good enough.

They said: I know you get your job satisfaction from yelling at people who don’t do what they’re supposed to.

I had the impulse to argue but…. while that’s imprecise, it’s not wrong. I modified it to: I get the MOST satisfaction when people do as they’re told. But if they don’t do what they’re told, and I want to yell at them, I can. (Not my staff, I never yell at my staff, it’s external clients who suck. They lie a lot. So many lies. So much fraud.) I also get a lot of satisfaction from the act of getting things done. So the parts of my job where I can just get things done, those are good parts of my day. I also like setting policies and teaching other people to think critically about our policies and to make suggestions for better policies. I like it when people learn to do a good job. (I don’t like the act of teaching, I hate that part, but I like having taught and gotten the information imparted to the right people.)

They’re only ten so they have lots of time to mull things. At this point, I just want them to start developing a sense for what things bring them satisfaction and which things feel bad as they build up a profile of possibilities.