If you have the means, and want to support your kids’ or grandkids’ educational efforts, I would consider funding or even overfunding 529s for them.
If you use a 529 plan, and you use the Pennsylvania plan, it escapes inheritance taxes and grows tax free if the money is used for education for as long as the money is in the plan. Now that means, you might want to consider funding it more fully than it might have been in the past or fully funding it if you can keep it in the plan for a long time.
It’s tricky with education because you don’t know how much they’re going to need because few pay the sticker price for private schools, and you don’t want to overfund it because it is stuck with education; but if you think about it, if you do have the means, and you have enough for your own retirement and are otherwise secure, if there’s more in the child’s plan then they need and there’s money left over, that money can stay in that plan and then you can change it to another beneficiary, like say their children, and grow tax free and compounding for a generation.
That can really have a nice snowball effect, it might even be able to keep up with the cost of college inflation! Anyway, it’s not something that a lot of people can think about or do, but it’s something that I’ve been thinking a lot about the past couple months and I think for some, it’s something to consider. Think about full funding your 529 fully or even putting in more than you necessarily need. Again, if your retirement is secure and you don’t otherwise need the money. You could get some great tax and investment gains out of that.
