Gasem says:

Interesting podcast with a great panel.

I think some college degree is necessary if possible. You can teach yourself a lot of stuff like coding, Photoshop and excel but that kind of education has a lot of holes in it and what you learn might not be efficient. I can code but my code is at best functional and not professional and I’m slow because I spend a lot of time debugging. As to funding, I did it differently. I’m not sure why everyone goes to the 529. I put 20K for each kid in a UGTM at age 3 in Vanguard funds all stocks. By the 18-22 spend down the money had nearly quadrupled and we spent it down on a per semester basis over 4 years so each year the remainder still continued compounding. The spend down was much like an accelerated retirement. It is true at 18 the money becomes “theirs” but I just didn’t tell them about it, managed it and did their taxes for them. Took about 10 minutes per year. In fact you could load up $50K of BRK.B at age 2 and let it grow for 50 years and not tell them and at age 50 they would have a retirement. BRK.B throws off no dividends or interest so it’s dark as far as tax consequence until you sell it. $50K of BRK.B over 50 years at it’s current long term 11.7% ROI would be worth 12M. Can’t do that with a stupid 529. The net per year cost to me over the 20 year accumulation and payout was about $2K per year per kid. Starbucks kind of money.

The UGTM paid for housing food travel vacations electronics clothes and semester in Europe and was 75% interest (aka free money) by the time we cracked it. Tuition was covered by a state program I bought them at age 2 which guaranteed 120 hours of college including fees at any state college from the flagships on down. , so there was plenty of variety and possible specialization in terms of major. When my daughter graduated I used the last $15K to buy her an off lease Honda civic with 25K miles on it and a 3 year warranty so she was set to start her life. The piddly little extra interest you make in a 529 is worthless when it comes being able to buy your kid a car to start their life or 5 mos. in Europe. My net outlay for each kid was $42K in 21K installments over 2 years, so my net outlay was 84K over 4 years, and college was paid for. If I or we died, their education was paid for and my money wasn’t going to some insurance company to cover the “just in case”. I was my own insurance company. I became an MD and a multimillionaire on a state school education and had a blast to boot. I retired in the middle of their college years and the pre-planning meant college has/had very little impact on my retirement cash flow. One kid is still in school. My experience of the Ivy league crowd is they are quite full of themselves. Yet they’re all slavishly funding 529’s and insurance companies and feeling quite proud I’m sure.