We’re reaching a milestone. Our oldest is going off to college and I’m curious how much parents provide their young adults on a monthly basis for food and incidentals. My son has worked consistently since age 15 but is only now finally getting the importance of saving. As such he doesn’t have much to show for his efforts except a bunch of Uber Eats receipts, shoes and clothing that he purchased. He’ll be staying on campus,

A question for discussion. Is an eighteen year old an adult? Do you expect an 18 year old to pay their bills, to be on their own for college?
Several years ago on HD someone wrote in a comment that when their child reach age 18, they were done. They expected them out of the house and they were on their own.  Another wrote that when their youngest child graduated high school, the were relocating south and leaving the child behind. 

A question for discussion. Is an eighteen year old an adult? Do you expect an 18 year old to pay their bills, to be on their own for college?
Several years ago on HD someone wrote in a comment that when their child reach age 18, they were done. They expected them out of the house and they were on their own.  Another wrote that when their youngest child graduated high school, the were relocating south and leaving the child behind. 

We always told our four children they could attend college anywhere they were accepted. My pathetic college experience drove me to want much better for our children. Was it a prudent money decision, probably not. These days I am skeptical that college is even a good value. 
At the time our ten years of college spending started, there was no plan, no dedicated funds, no large pool of any assets, except our house. It was an interesting ten years with monthly college payment books for two or three at a time. 

It is essential to support public education. Although four generations of my family are or have attended Catholic schools, I’m happy to pay my share. However, things are getting complicated in Ohio, where a progressive system topped off at 7.5% in 2004, has been reduced to 3.15% this year, and becomes a flat tax of 2.75% in 2026.
Filers of schedules C, E, F and K get a free pass on their first $250,000 of earnings.

A July 31, 2025, article in The New York Times triggered this post. The headline reads: Saving for College Once Felt Essential. Some Parents Are Rethinking Their Plans.
The article is primarily about 529 plans, but also about saving or attending college at all. One comment caught my eye as it questioned the value of college because it didn’t guarantee a good job. I wasn’t aware college ever guaranteed a job or anything else for that matter. 

I perhaps have a contrarian view of the utility of some higher education courses. This opinion has developed over the last 20 years or so, talking and interacting with younger staff I employed within my past business. Degree courses seem to have somewhat transformed into a business model, more influenced by volume over suitability of the course and proper weight being given to the future earning and retirement outcome expectations the course will achieve.
To use a fishing analogy,

Our oldest child is age 55, – three children ages 14 and 12 (twins),
our second is age 54 – three children ages 14, 13 and 10,
our third age 51 – three children 18,17 and 13,
and our fourth age 50 – two children ages 20 and 17
All ages are rounded.
Look at these ages and what comes to mind, college, retirement? Pretty sure not retirement any time soon. This is what I ponder when I read about FIRE or even early retirement before age 60.

Connie and I had four children between July 1970 and September 1975. That was a fun decade especially given I was going to school three nights a week until 1978 when after nine years I received a degree.
Those fun times were only surpassed by the ten years when we had one, two or three children in college at once. Our oldest went to Carnegie Mellon on a required five-year program and the others all went to Franklin and Marshall –

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.

THE CONTROVERSY over student loans has caught up with the latest federal government repayment program. That program is known as SAVE, or Saving on A Valuable Education.
SAVE is an income-driven repayment plan, or IDR. It’s the sixth iteration of an IDR plan. Due to the favorable terms and the high estimated price tag, it was recently halted by legal challenges.
IDR plans follow the same general formula to determine the monthly payment on student loan debt.

I am not opposed to college and certainly not education.
However, college can be a waste of money. Completing college takes too long. College is too expensive and we are lured unnecessarily into a cost/prestige trap.
My college experience is not typical so I am not a good example. I got out of the army a few months early to attend college. I was 26. For the next nine years I attended a community college and then a state university nights and weekends.

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.

YOU COULD CALL ME a 529 superfan. The college savings plans helped me put my two kids through college. Their state and federal tax advantages cut the exorbitant cost of college just enough so we didn’t have to borrow for our two kids’ education.
Which makes it surprising that I knew the man who created the 529 plan—but I didn’t realize he’d fathered them.
I covered Senator Bob Graham of Florida as a newspaper reporter in Washington in the 1990s,

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.