WE’RE A SINGLE-INCOME family with five children, so the prospect of paying for college for all our kids is daunting, to say the least. Yes, our oldest is now in her second year of college. But we still have a long way to go before they’ve all crossed the finish line.
Our kids are ages 19, 17, 12, nine and six. We’ve been homeschooling them since the beginning, with a few brief exceptions, including one daughter in a Department of Defense high school in Korea for a year and another daughter in a private high school for two years.

I’VE TAUGHT BEHAVIORAL economics, which holds that even our most important decisions are influenced by unrecognized biases. For my students, there’s no better example than the choice of where they went to college.
Although the cost is enormous, the decision of where to go hinges on the smallest things. A teenager who says, “I want to be close to my boyfriend,” will zero in on a nearby college, even if her high school romance is fading.

Over the last 17 years, I have been saving a modest amount each month in a 529 plan. I have been doing the same for my daughter for the past 14 years. Given the market performance and our steady contributions over time, these modest monthly contributions have grown to be a sizable amount. While I am thrilled that we should have most of our college cost covered, I’ve often wondered if the 529 plan was the best bet in saving for college.

INVESTING FOR education costs has never been more popular, as evidenced by recent Morningstar data. The research company found that 2021 was a record-breaking year for assets in 529 college savings plans. At almost $500 billion, total investments are up nearly fourfold over the past decade.
A big reason is the tax advantages—investments grow tax-free if they’re used for qualifying education expenses—plus 529 accounts are treated relatively leniently under the college financial-aid formulas. You can learn more about the accounts from other authors who have real life experience saving through 529 plans.

WHAT SHOULD I DO with the required minimum distributions from my rollover IRAs?
I’m age 65, which means that—under last year’s tax law—I must begin taking taxable distributions in 2030, the year I turn 73. I’ve been looking at my retirement cash flow, and it appears that my wife and I won’t need the money for our living expenses.
I’m investigating using the money to help fund my grandkids’ college education. I built a spreadsheet that maps my age against the age of each grandchild and determined the years they’re expected to attend college.

AT THE BEGINNING of 2022, I wrote about our resolution to go back to grad school. The short update: Jiab and I are indeed doing it. We’re enrolled in the Master of Arts in Interdisciplinary Studies program at the University of Texas at Dallas.
We scrambled to get the application paperwork done before classes started Jan. 18. Neither of us had applied to school for ourselves since the introduction of online registration, but we found it fairly easy.