Reply to In laws offered to pay for private. Crazy to turn them down?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Why does it have to be for school? Why can't they just write checks to all grand-children and be done with it.
Why are they so involved in your life anyway and with money?
You have your own money and your kids will be fine too. They can hand down the money some other way without telling you how to use it.[/quote]

Gifting money to family members for school is a way to reduce your taxable estate above and beyond the annual IRS gift limits. So you can give relatives x amount annually in cash and then ALSO pay for education. So paying for school is a way for them to give grandchildren more without the IRS taking a cut, essentially. [/quote]

Exactly! This is why many grandparents pay for private school directly, because it allows them to support the heirs more effectively. However, you should make educational decisions based on your child's need not because someone else is paying. [/quote]

Yes, the posters saying OP should ask for something else for her family or just have the money put in an account are being kind of gauche and clueless. The parents are offering to pay for something they value - private education - that does not count against their estate tax exemption.[/quote]

[b]It's not clear that they are giving to the exemption now, though, especially because OP thought it might work for them to pay for camp. It's worth asking.[/b]

A lot of grandparents who help with tuition are not extremely savvy about taxes, they just want to help and they know in a general way that there are tax benefits to paying for tuition. And a lot of them have an emotional aversion to writing a check instead of "paying for something" - to put it in smaller terms, my mom will buy $100 of clothes for DD but would never write a $100 check to DD. [/quote]

+1 to this. They could also give OP and spouse up to $38k a year each. And then pay for other things (like camp or extracurricular programs) up to the limit (again, $38k per kid). Could give gifts of up to $152k just to OP’s family. Lots of ways to reduce a taxable estate that don’t have to be private school tuition. If the goal is to reduce the estate and they aren’t already maxing their gift tax exemptions, it’s worth trying to redirect.[/quote]

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