We want Lemon to have the best of both of our stories, M's normal college experience and my lack of a drag on my credit report. I've been doing some research and right now I think I've narrowed it down to two ways to help our little citrus pay for school. The first way is the Washington GET and the second is the Coverdell ESA and we could also do both at the same time.
The Washington GET (Guaranteed Education Tuition) is, according to their website:
GET is Washington state's 529 prepaid college tuition program. With GET, you prepay for your child's college tuition today. The State of Washington guarantees that the value of your units will keep pace with resident undergraduate tuition and state-mandated fees at the most expensive public university in Washington, either the University of Washington or Washington State University.Basically, you buy units at a set price today and you use them in the future to pay for college. Right now a unit costs $76 (125 units = 1 year of college) but in 18 years it will be worth 1/125th of whatever tuition costs at Washington's most expensive public university, presumably a lot more than 76 dollars.
The Coverdell ESA (Education Savings Account) is a tax advantaged investment account designed to encourage savings to cover future education experiences. It's kind of like an IRA but for education instead of retirement. It even used to be called the Coverdell IRA until somebody realized that didn't make sense.
Both programs have their pros and cons, which you can read about in the links above. I think we will end up using a combination of both. If anybody has any helpful info please feel free to leave it in the comments.
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