Baby in graduation cap

Financial planning for college: should you bother saving?

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Nobody wants to pay for something, then watch someone less deserving who gets it for free. A dear friend recently raised this situation: are you a sucker for saving, while somebody else spends freely and their kid gets more money from a college?

I’ll give a very qualified yes to this—there are a few situations where it doesn’t pay (very much, at least) to save for college. Let’s say you make under $75,000 a year and have no investments beyond retirement accounts. Your family probably will qualify for some serious financial aid, and would get less if you saved into a 529 plan. But I really question how much a family would be able to save on that income, and if they can, they should be pouring it into their 401k and a Roth IRA. Can a family making $75,000 a year really manage to save more than $25,000 (the maximum into these accounts)? I seriously doubt it.

If your child doesn’t finish school or joins the military instead, you might have done better saving into your own accounts.

That’s it. That other family of merry spenders who got so much more than you? Did you see the award letter? Because lots of people lie. Especially people like to “reinvent” things in the best light possible—that “aid” might have actually been in the form of a subsidized loan, or the “free ride” might have been a waiver of tuition or some small amount of “scholarship” aid. If it was a state public school, and they are remotely middle class, it’s all going to be loans. If it’s a private school, it’s probably still some loans, or they have financial issues you don’t know about, or the school competes with publics by bringing the cost of attendance down to approximately what a state uni would have cost. Cost of attendance is the important number: what it actually costs to spend a year at the school, including tuition, dorm, food, books (can be a whopper), fees, etc. Add in transportation, moving the kid’s belongings back and forth or in storage, and the inevitable dorm refrigerator (not included in the school’s website estimates).

For nine years now, I’ve challenged anyone to tell me about somebody they know first-hand, who had family income over $100k, who’s child got all costs of attendance covered with no loans, for 4 years (athletic scholarships not included). I’ve yet to have someone come up with that family, but I’m still interested. It’s always 3rd hand, or a one-year fellowship (usually after the kid is already at the school), or tuition only.

It’s easier for a college to waive tuition than it is to cover the full cost. Why? Because tuition just requires paying professors and administrators, and those costs can be averaged onto other people. You can always stick a few more people into a given class. But coming up with an actual dorm bed, feeding the kid, and providing books actually costs money. Those “free rides” you hear about that go to low income families are usually free tuition, and then a loan package for living costs—and living costs are often the whopper.

But let’s say you have family earnings of $76K-150K, and maybe even another kid who will be in college at the same time. You might qualify for some aid. What if you were really careful and managed to amass $100,000 in a 529 college savings account? At worst, about $5,000 of that would be considered “available” each year for all your kids in college. (Same for parents’ non-retirement investments). Sadly, a reduction in aid of $5,000 is real money, but compared to the total cost of attendance, it’s a drop in the bucket. But having $25,000 available each year is going to make some serious difference to your child’s options and future indebtedness.

Remember, many colleges do not cover all demonstrated financial need. They’ll give you something, but sorry Charlie if you can’t scare up the rest—I’m not sure how they can assume you’ve been honest about your finances, then expect you to come up with more. Or maybe they just don’t care because there’s somebody right behind you on the waiting list.
Some schools have grandly announced that they’ll cover all need for families making under $XX a year. Note that that does not necessarily mean free—it only means they’ll cover the gap (as they calculate it) with aid rather than loans. For example, the University of Chicago says that if you make under $125K, they’ll cover tuition. But you have to make under $60K for them to cover the entire cost of attendance ($83,760 according to the school, compared to Northwestern’s $78,654).

But here’s the hitch—the kid has to get in, and any school that announces that will suddenly see an enormous jump in their applications, so your kid has even less chance of getting in than previously. I’d genuinely like to know how many kids attend who actually receive the full ride. Does anyone seriously believe that they will fill their class by allegedly need-blind selection, and then just randomly discover that they have to cough up more money from their endowments from all the kids they just admitted? I think I hear the sound of one hand clapping.

The exceptions to this are two: your kid is a world class athlete and gets an athletic scholarship that includes living expense, or your kid is a nationally desirable scholar (think published a novel, won the Davidson or Intel, has ground breaking published research or inventions) and is willing to go somewhere lesser than the ivy league. If your kid will outrank (grades + test scores + other achievements) 90% of that school’s current population, they might be willing to ante up something to entice them to come—but you should check that the guarantee is for more than one year.
Saving for the kid’s college means they won’t be burdened with very heavy debt incurred for living expenses, books, getting home for holidays, and every other surprising thing it actually costs to go to college.

BTW, if your child does get significant merit scholarship aid, you can withdraw the amount from the 529 penalty free. Or you can just leave it alone, because there’s always grad school…

Ukulele

What I learned at Ukulele Camp that applies to finances

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I’m pretty die-hard about DIYing everything I can. Yes, I know there’s a lot of argument that you should pay someone to do things while you’re out earning more per hour at something else, but I don’t buy it entirely. First of all, most of us spend plenty of time scrolling Facebook, binge-watching Netflix, and staring into the refrigerator. None of that is billable time.

There are a lot of projects that just require brute force and minimum skills—I’ll paint my bedroom over a weekend before I pay someone $800 to do it. However, I draw the line at danger (painting the trim on my second floor from a loooong ladder), back-breaking difficulty or heavy hauling (digging post holes and installing a fence), or things that I’m not confident about learning from YouTube (installing a new kitchen faucet and drain).

I’ve had quite a few music lessons over the past, um, decades, so I have been pretty convinced that I could teach myself to play ukulele and guitar from the huge number of books, YouTubes, and online courses available. And, they’ve worked pretty well. Feeling somewhat confident, I went to a few jam sessions at the Old Town School, where I discovered I had miles to go before I cheep. I definitely needed some real-time instruction.

This weekend we trucked up to Midwest Uke Camp in Olivet, Michigan. I came home, not only reinvigorated about playing, but about the place of music in life in general—playing, performing, singing, dancing. With all the grinding away, I had lost sight of the pure joy of it all. And since November, 2016, I think I’ve lost sight of some of the joy available in life. As so many blues masters knew, no one can take music away from you.

But, like everything else I do, I did see some parallels between the very delightful Uke Camp experience and our financial life:

  • When there are a lot of choices, you can’t swoop up everything.

For some time slots, there were 3 or 4 classes I wanted to take. I tried to find out who was a good teacher (all of them!) or offered something particularly appealing. No matter how much you wish, you can’t take more than one—and you probably can’t afford to hook on to every good investment. Go with what you can, given what time and knowledge you have available.

  • It’s not possible to make the optimum choice every time.

There was one class where, maybe, I could have chosen better. The teacher’s style just wasn’t right for me, although his music, omg… But that doesn’t ruin the whole selection, nor the other seven or eight choices I made. Similarly, for every given number of choices (investments) you make, some will not turn out as well as you expect. And some will perform far better—who knew I loved Django Reinhardt gypsy jazz? You have to look at the total experience (performance), incorporate what you learned, and try to do better next time, where you will make mistakes again. Improvement is not perfectly linear, but it should lurch in the right direction.

  • In person makes a difference.

I adore self-study. I can make all kinds of mistakes and make them LOUD, and no one will hear me, except for my dog. When she sees me grab the uke, she immediately asks to go out.

Nevertheless, there’s a lot to be gained from the personal interaction with a good teacher. They can correct subtle mistakes in real time, come up with a trick that solves your individual problem, and there’s the serendipitous addition of techniques and information they just happen to think of that’s not in their books or videos. A good teacher always knows more than they’re putting in print. That’s the chief benefit—the individualization. Sure, you can learn a lot about playing (and financial planning) from a pre-fab program, but at some point, you need it to apply to you, particularly. I think online lessons, websites, asset allocation programs, and all that jazz are great, but everyone has some unique challenges. In fact, if you come to the professional already having a good background, you can probably get more benefit from the one-on-one.

The interaction with other people can often give you new insights and ease your mind about how you compare. It’s oddly comforting to see other people struggling or making and recovering from mistakes. I’d love to see more opportunity for people to be part of investment clubs.

  • Seize the opportunities when offered

The best teachers may not be back. The event probably will not go on forever. It can be hard to find fiduciary, fee-only advice. The crowd was mainly older than 50 and so many said they wished they’d done it, younger. I hear it all the time about financial planning, too. Don’t put it off—neither playing an instrument nor making a financial plan are as difficult as they seem in your imagination.

Health care stethescope

That other retirement account: Financial planning for HSAs

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Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) may be the best deal out there, if you can get it. All of us like to beat the tax man, right? HSAs are what’s known as triple tax free: you get a deduction when you put money into the account, the account grows tax free, and as long as you make withdrawals for allowable health care expenses (pretty easy to do), you don’t pay any tax on that either. They’re like a traditional IRA or 401k going in, and a Roth coming out.
But like many good things, there are a few problems and things to watch out for:
1) I’ve probably repeated this for the millionth time now, but you don’t have to pay yourself back for the medical expenses in the year you spent the money. You can accumulate the receipts (and carefully file them so you can find them) and withdraw them in any year, as in when you actually retire. You’ll have to be able to pay your deductible and out of pocket costs out of pocket, but if these are fairly low, you can keep the HSA invested.
2) As with every financial account, watch the fees. Some accounts ding you heavily if you don’t keep a minimum balance. Some charge you a monthly fee. Some employers will pay fees while you’re employed with them, but if you leave they stop paying the fees and the account starts getting bites out of it. If this is the case, you can rollover your HSA into a servicer with different (hopefully, better) rules.
3) It doesn’t do you any good to park it in a savings account paying half a percent. In this case, woohoo it’s growing tax free. But the growth is infinitesimal. You want an HSA that allows you to transfer the bulk to a brokerage, or at least invest in mutual funds. Even if you still work for the same employer as when you deposited the funds, you can rollover the account (or most of it) to a provider of your own choosing. Be sure you carefully check fees and options at your current account, and at the one you are thinking of opening.
4) If you are working with an investment advisor, you may want to consider whether the HSA should be invested as part of your overall portfolio strategy. If it’s going to be untapped for years, it should be managed to build wealth.

Once you’re retired, it’s probably a good idea not to hoard that HSA. If you leave it to your spouse, it becomes their HSA. But for any other heir, it’s a lump sum distribution that they will have to pay taxes on.

So, how do you use it up? Well, of course you can submit those hoarded medical expenses you’ve saved. You can also use it to pay premiums for long term care insurance, premiums for Medicare Part B and Part D (drug), vision and dental care not covered by Medicare supplement insurance, and any copays and deductibles. You cannot use it to pay supplemental or Medigap premiums.

Since these accounts do not usually grow extremely large, it seems to me that it would be pretty easy to use it up during a normal retirement. It’s a nice way to build up a war chest for unexpected medical expenses that crash retirement budgets. Too bad I can’t use it for veterinary bills.