Saving for your kids' education

[thebigcheese]

Interesting perspective. Personally, I think it's cool when guys save up for their missions. I think it demonstrates great maturity when they decide that they want to do that (without being pressured by their parents, that is).

[Katya]

So, I don't know about college, but our son is going to have a mission fund he is going to contribute to as soon as he starts earning money.

What would happen to the money if he decided not to go on a mission?

[TheAnswerIs42]

Actually, my mother in law just has control issues. She does have a story about how they found some termites, but didn't have the money to replace the wall since they had three on missions at the moment, and then when they finally did replace it years later there were no termites to be found. But she never used the "blessings" logic to my husband. It's a control thing. She does lots of things to squash independance in her children. (This is the part of the conversation that only Sky Bones can relate to . . .)

And Katya- I think the idea is just teaching a boy early about what he is headed towards, and making sure he understands how important it is by saving for it. In fact, I can honestly say I have my doubts that my son will serve a mission. He has some learning disabilities, and I have honestly no clue how well functioning he will grow up to be. In that case, I guess the mission fund would be prayerfully distributed to some other cause in his life.

[Unit of Energy]

On the topic of missions, I would like to have my daughters save as well. If they decide not to serve missions, so be it, it can be their wedding fund or a down payment on a house or something. I've thought about serving a mission, but finances are not such that I can in the foreseeable future.

[Yellow]

On the topic of missions, I would like to have my daughters save as well. If they decide not to serve missions, so be it, it can be their welding fund or a down payment on a house or something. I've thought about serving a mission, but finances are not such that I can in the foreseeable future.

Your post was much funnier as I first read it.

[ahem.]

I think it demonstrates great maturity when they decide that they want to do that (without being pressured by their parents, that is).

I agree with your statemen. But I was just thinking... isn't every young man (assuming an active family) pressured into serving a mission? I mean, I know many genuinely want to serve, but I don't think you can separate out the effects of peer/parental pressure.

On the topic of missions, I would like to have my daughters save as well. If they decide not to serve missions, so be it, it can be their wedding fund or a down payment on a house or something. I've thought about serving a mission, but finances are not such that I can in the foreseeable future.

So, if it just goes to whatever they need it for (be it a mission, or college, or whatever), what's the point of calling it a mission fund instead of just a savings account?

Another comment. Every single kid in my family had a savings account that we were not allowed to take money out of unless we had a very very good reason. Any check I ever got went into that account: birthday checks, checks for babysitting (which is why I loved people who paid me in cash), checks I won for writing contests, etc. By the end of my high school career, I really only had like $1500 in there (which mostly came from checks I got for graduation). So when people talk about having their kids save for things like college or missions, I'm not sure how much good that really does. Admittedly, I never had a job until my freshman year of college so maybe that's a factor that could be different for other people.

[Unit of Energy]

If I had saved every penny I ever got prior to high school graduation, I would have had a minimum of $3000. My parents never gave us an allowance, but in order to teach us money management, they paid us for yard work and babysitting and mailing letters for their home business. We were paid less than what a professional would have been paid, but it taught us kids something.

As for why call it saving for a mission as opposed to a savings account, saving for something is easier than just putting your money somewhere you can't use it. Particularly when I was young, I had trouble grasping the concept of not being allowed to touch money just because. Assigning a reason to put the money away made it so much easier.

[Katya]

You guys!!! We should totally do a study!!! We can randomly select which of us will pay for all of our kids' college / mission stuff and then we can check back in 20-25 years and see whose kids are more well-adjusted and/or righteous.

[krebscout]

My parents told me that they would give me $100 a month as long as I had a job and until I got married, and if I ran out of money despite doing my best, they "wouldn't let [me] starve." Thanks to the half tuition (it was full, but that didn't last too long) scholarship and 15-25 hour workweeks throughout college, I made it despite having pretty much nothing saved up. I'm going to have my kids get jobs for sure, but mostly I'm going to strongly, strongly encourage them to get and keep good scholarships.

[thebigcheese]

Haha, Katya...I'm pretty sure there would be something unethical about that. I like the "we'll give you x dollars per month" idea though. The trick is figuring out how much is appropriate.

I think scholarships are AMAZING when you can get them. But if I may soapbox/tell my sob story for a moment, I have a beef with competitive grading. I've seen both sides of it. I was always a really smart kid, really talented academically, so anything related to school was always pretty easy for me and I came into BYU with a scholarship. I had scholarships for a few semesters, but my lack of success in my original major completely and totally destroyed my chances of getting a scholarship for basically the rest of my BYU career. It was an art-based major, and I simply wasn't artistically talented enough to keep up with my peers. But I didn't discover that until my sophomore year when the classes started getting harder and they started grading on a curve. So, long story short, despite putting WAY more time and effort into school than I ever had in my entire life (read: spending entire days, entire nights, and entire weekends on campus on a regular basis), I got horrendous grades that year. And I lost the scholarship, with basically no hope of ever regaining it.

So, grading on a curve in a major that's based on talent = huge GPA killer for those at the bottom of the curve. I couldn't get a B to save my life. Talent gave the other students an edge that I simply couldn't keep up with, despite putting in a lot more hours and a lot more effort. I can't even begin to describe how stressful and frustrating that was for me. They didn't kick me out of the major. After 4 semesters I quit because, compared to my peers, I didn't feel sufficiently qualified to pursue that as a career. Otherwise, I absolutely loved that major and I still miss it sometimes. The major I ended up graduating in (psychology) was never half as cool or even 1/10 as interesting to me. Sigh.

Um, the moral of the story is...well, I don't know. Academic scholarships are not necessarily for the hard workers (though they certainly can be). Scholarships require hard work plus a good dose of talent, academic or otherwise.

[krebscout]

May I ask what the art-related major was?

[thebigcheese]

Industrial design

[krebscout]

Oh! Intense. I was wondering which art major graded on a curve like that. Definitely interesting stuff...and difficult.

[thebigcheese]

Yeah, it was tough. There were other things about that major too...the attrition rate was high (at least 60-70%), so most of my original class was gone by the time I got very far in the major. You had to re-apply annually, three different times to stay in the major (so...they could kick you out as a junior). But they've since revised that policy since so many students were getting kicked out with two years wasted and 40 credits that didn't count toward any other major.

[Sky Bones]

Actually, my mother in law just has control issues. She does have a story about how they found some termites, but didn't have the money to replace the wall since they had three on missions at the moment, and then when they finally did replace it years later there were no termites to be found. But she never used the "blessings" logic to my husband. It's a control thing. She does lots of things to squash independance in her children. (This is the part of the conversation that only Sky Bones can relate to . . .)

Hah! Yeah... hah. I can definitely relate...

This, and all the talk of finances, reminds me of that time two years ago when my mother-in-law told me that if they weren't so willing to sacrifice so much in order for her husband to teach at BYU, then they (meaning both my mother-in-law and father-in-law) would be able to drive brand new Lexus's instead of their 8-year-old Lexus's that they currently have... I just find this statement so ironic considering they completely cut-off all financial support of all of their children as soon as they graduated high school (well, they did pay for about half of the mission costs for their sons that actually ended up going on missions). At least my husband got half-tuition at BYU for his father being a professor, right?

[vorpal blade]

This is an interesting discussion.

My parents felt that we would appreciate our college education more, and learn to work, if we paid our own way through college. There are nine of us children, and all nine of us worked our way through college (except one brother who died at the age of 19). My parents had the money to easily put us through college, but it was the principle of the thing. I assumed that my policy for my children would be the same. I do feel that I appreciated my education more this way, and I've been basically earning and saving money my whole life, as a way of life. I learned a good work ethic.

Then I got married, and my wife was raised with a different philosophy. Basically her parents paid for everything, but when she did a semester abroad they did not pay for all the weekly trips most of the students were taking. And if she wanted to spend something extra on clothes or such she had to work and save for it.

We never saved specifically for our children's education. We saved what we could and paid off our house. But we really didn't decide what we were going to do for our children until they were ready to go to college. We ended up compromising by agreeing to pay a fixed amount each month for room and board, and they would have to pay for everything else. It was interesting that my second oldest child was a little upset that he didn't know what the deal would be well in advance. He said that had he known he would have worked harder at improving his GPA in high school so he could get a better scholarship. He got a half-tuition scholarship the first semester, but quickly improved that to a full tuition scholarship. Except for my first and last children they have all gotten the message and received full tuition scholarships from BYU, plus other scholarship money. They worked hard in college to keep their scholarships.

My children also know that when they get married or graduate from college then we no longer support them. They are totally on their own in graduate school. None of them have complained about being treated unfairly. I feel good about the fact that all my children out of school have good jobs. One of them put herself through law school with money left over in the bank and no debt. Another finished graduate school (with a PH.D. in mechanical engineering) with enough money to buy a home and pay cash for a new car. I'm still not sure how he managed to do that.

I feel that the way we have done it has worked well for our children.