MS parents: How much have you saved for college (529, etc.)?
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Anonymous
| 8th grade. About $120K. |
Anonymous
| 7th grader has right at $100k. |
Anonymous
| Maxed out both 5th and 7th graders accounts. |
Anonymous
| We are in md. We have already paid for 5 years of MD prepaid college trust (50K). If he goes out of state, we will manage. |
Anonymous
|
6th grader has about $20k. Third grader has nothing.
We will both work while they are in college and plan to pay as we go and possibly downsize at/around the same time. We might get grandparent help. We're in NoVa, and I have no issue with one or both starting at community college if that's the right fit. |
Anonymous
| 8th grade $60k. Comfortable with where we’ll be by graduation and covering in-state should be very doable. |
Anonymous
| 6th grader about $39K and 4th grader only about $8K. We make decent money. HHI about $160K but most of that is from a job that may or may not "disappear" in 2 or 3 years, so I'm very nervous about putting a lot of money into the 529s. Instead, we max out 401ks, IRAs, HSAs, and contribute to a taxable brokerage account every month. I hope the kids earn some grants/scholarships. I don't want them to have a lot of student loan debt after getting their Bachelors. I am not against them going to Community College to knock out their gen eds and anything else they can. |
Anonymous
| $160K for an 8th grader. |
Anonymous
| 7th grader - $115k |
Anonymous
| $37k 8th grade, but we have an inherited IRA will use If needed worth $350k right now, but it will count as income for taxes so only want to use it above RMD if necessary. |
Anonymous
| We have not saved any and have focused on saving for retirement. We are selling a piece of real estate and should receive about $430K. Will use some of that for tuition when our twins are ready for college in two years. |
Anonymous
|
1st Grader about $6,000
I am not feeding into the notion that I need to spend thousand of dollars on 4 years of college for the experience....She can go to community college and transfer, or live at home and save several thousand. If she needs a degree we will do our best to help her. But for us that is not going to be putting ourselves into dept. |
Anonymous
| $350K. Kids are 16 and 18. One is in State so that's good. The other may need to go out of state to get into a better school than she can get into in state. |
Anonymous
It is. I teach in public schools and don’t like what I see. Students rule the roost, inflated grades, no homework required, absences don’t matter, sleeping in class, play on your cell phones all you want during class, etc. No thanks. |
Anonymous
What school do you teach in? My DS is FCPS and he has 2-3 hours of homework a night. He hates being sick b/c if he misses a day, it's a real pain to try and catch up with learning new material, taking a test, etc. The teachers don't go over the missed material unless you come to them after school (which is how it should be). A few of the classes are easy to get good grades in, but in a couple of them, he is one of the top scorers, and he still barely has an A - jumps b/w A and A- all the time. If a phone is even seen in class, it's immediately taken away and they don't get it back until the end of the day and at the main office. Sure, there are some terrible teachers, and issues like overcrowding, but overall, I'm pretty happy with the education. And yes, I went to private school. We decided to save our money for college instead of paying for private school. Now, I will guess you are not in a great school district, so you're trade off is to pay for private over buying in a better school district. I get that - it's expensive around here. But you really can get a great education in a lot of the public schools around here and don't need to waste money on private. For a lot of people, their money is better spent on saving for college. |