Yes, you can in a 529 account. The beneficiary information in the account has to be changed to match the intended recipient.

My other recommendation is to make contributions on an annual rather than monthly basis. This would probably exclude setting up your own 529 plan — ours requires a minimal monthly deposit of $30 — but it does give you more flexibility to reassess all your goals and adjust for increases in the number of nieces and nephews and any changes in your own situation. Thirty dollars per month per kid may be manageable now, but add a few more kids or a decrease in income, and you’re looking at a significant line item in your budget.

There are also programs developed specifically for students on the Autism spectrum.

Please be sure to encourage him to continue his education beyond high school just as much as you encourage your nieces!

I don’t find 8%+ returns over 55 years as being particularly “conservative,” even with historical averages being at or above that. Use the same facts but with a more conservative 3% return and you get around 45K at age 55.

All that being said, I literally do this exact same practice for myself, my spouse, and my children. Every month I put $50 in S&P 500 index fund for each person, everything auto-reinvest. So far so good.

You can setup a 529 and retain control. The money is still owned by you. Its not the property of the child. You control when and if they get the money or not.

I’d setup individual 529′s and not combine them with your relatives. The 529 is owned by one person and it could get messy if people disagree or worst case if someone passes. Setting up more than one 529 should not be hard. Just fill out a form and mail it in with a check. (or do it online) Easy.

I would save as much as you can in bulk and then spread the amount out over however many kids there are. I would not promise or commit to giving each kid a certain amount, but just indicate if you want that you plan to help with costs. I would not give them a ‘full ride’ even if you can afford it but thats my opinion. I think people should have some stake in the cost of their own education. They can earn scholarships, work or take loans.

We are telling our kids that we will pay up to what it costs to attend Penn State, which of course is a well ranked school. That means they can either go there or they’ll need to look at schools which perhaps aren’t as highly ranked, but will give them academic merit aid. What we don’t want is to have them (or us) take out loans. We don’t see the return on investment on some of the more highly ranked schools, like Princeton or University of Pennsylvania. (Not that all of our kids would get into those elite schools, but some of them, in particular our oldest, would have a shot).

Only one of our kids has any possibility of qualifying for an athletic scholarship, but he’s only 7 right now so I haven’t looked into that angle yet.

So if I start a 529 for my niece, and then my husband’s brother has a son (a nephew), I can us the same 529 for both, EVEN IF THEY ARE IN COLLEGE AT THE SAME TIME.

I have only one 529, but I have two kids of my own, and younger nieces and nephews. If there’s any money left when my own girls are out of school, I can easily use it to support our siblings’ kids.

Depending on if I have kids or if others little ones come into my life, I will increase my contributions in the future.

Also, to resolve the “sticky” third question: share all your research, but have them make their own decisions and open their own account(s). There’s little reason to “combine forces” on this, so why get into such sticky issues? You can combine dollars later.

I suppose it might be possible to do something with changing beneficiaries, but I’m not sure if you can do that multiple times per year.

This is by no means a fully fleshed out thought or opinion, just a summary of what worked for my family. (Worked aside from the bitterness of my brother and I, who used up our share for its intended purpose, and then our cousins’ dad paid for their college, the lucky so-and-so’s, so they get their money when they’re 35. At least there’s that.)

Can you provide non-monatary assistance like letting her live with you if you are near a school she could get into? I would not offer full tuition, but help provided she gets the grades and passes the classes. So the matching is a good idea to me. She should avoid loans if possible or take the minimum necessary. I wouldn’t bother with the 529 if she’s ready to go now and you are unclear of her longer commitment. It might net you a state tax break, but the real use is untaxed earnings that you won’t be getting much of if anything, you can run the numbers to see if your state tax break is worth it to you.

The nonprofit maxim that “if you want money, ask for advice; if you want advice, ask for money” holds here – talking about advice will help you figure out how practical she is, what she’s willing to do to get through college, and how much she could work with you before money is actually on the table. And THEN you can think about what to do.

Reimbursement would maybe be a lot of trouble for her if she’d have to take out student loans just to pay them back at the end of the semester, but some kind of matching sounds like a great idea for motivating savings before and during college. You could also set up an increasing reward system based on performance – e.g. offer to pay for one course or some portion of it her first semester, but two if she gets through that, rather than a whole year at once. And make it based on accumulating credits, not letter grades – that’s what’s the most important thing, it’s not high school anymore.

Good luck! So nice of you to want to help!

My brother and I were extremely blessed to have grandparents who wanted to provide us with a life more well off than their own. Including both of us, they had two other grandchildren in which they gifted the same way, enabling them to control how much each grandchild received. As some stated before, their method was not the most aggressive avenue, however they provided each of us with US savings bonds whenever they deemed appropriate (birthdays, graduations, whenever they had extra money to give). By providing us the gifts in this manner both my brother and I have been able to use them not only towards college, but also after we graduated the money left over has been able to be used without a tax penalty (when compared to a 529) for things such as helping pay for a first car, a wedding and a down payment on our first homes. (Like I said, we have been extremely blessed that their generosity has provided us with so much)

Even so, now that I am saving for my daughter we actually have chosen a 529 plan. I see the positives and negatives with the 529, so to that end my husband and I have decided that we will contribute only enough into her (any any other sibling’s 529) to cover most of their college expenses. If we are lucky enough to have more to give them, we will be setting up a stand alone account in which we have control to later be given to them once they turn 30.

No matter what way you chose to set money aside for them, speaking from first hand experience I can tell you they will be forever grateful that you were so generous.

If she doesn’t have the means to pay at all, maybe suggest she take a few classes (as opposed to full time) and offer to pay for those so both of you can see how it goes. In this scenario, I’d also suggest any funds go directly to the college.

This is a bit old-fashioned, but my grandfather & my mom’s aunts all tended to give us a savings bond and some little present (like candy) for every Christmas and birthday. They weren’t enough to cover all or even most of college tuition, but as others are saying, every little bit helps, and covering it all isn’t your responsibiity as a generous relative anyway.

Yearly and equal gifts for each child are totally appropriate, and they are GIFTS, so it’s ok if they have to decrease in the future due to changes in your financial situation or the birth of more children. It’s also ok if you can’t contribute the same amount as the grandparents – who compares gifts? Would they criticize you if the toys you got your nieces and nephews were cheaper than the ones they bought for Christmas? Setting up an account together doesn’t imply a commitment to matching gifts, but if you’re nervous that’s what your relatives think, you can just tell them that your financial situations are different and may diverge further with more kids, so your families will have to decide on contributions separately.

Basically, my point is to work from what you can give at any given point, not from how much you think college will cost in 18 years (unpreditable! terrifying!) and what percentage of that you “should” pay.

Additionally, if the money isn’t shielded in a trust (e.g. 529s are basically a specific kind of trust), and something serious happens to them or to you, that money is reachable. It is potentially more reachable against them because even if they currently appear to have a lot of assets those could get wiped out with serious medical conditions in the next twenty years (if they’re sixty now, they’ll be eighty when the neices and nephews are entering and attending college), then that’s even more of a concern. Medicaid is already looking back 5 years in many states and trying to up that to 7 in some others. I know a family in NY state where they are facing a nursing home lawsuit because of money provided to a grandchild for college out of a grandparent’s personal account being within the lookback period. Hence I strongly recommend either not doing it with them or setting up a specific type of trust.

Maybe put the majority of the money into a 529 (or as someone noted, pick an opening amount per kid and then adjust contributions to all accordingly) and save some as a planned college money account but that would be accessible to you if needed or wanted for other purposes. If you don’t use it, you can always roll it into the 529s.

If someone isn’t comfortable with setting up an account themselves, or if the parents are a little weird about it (it happens), they could buy savings bonds for the kids. Not as profitable, but they will be able to cash them in and make some money, and it’s a very safe investment.