Where to record 529 Contributions

ESPlanner takes a somewhat different approach to 529 plans than it does to things like retirement plans. With retirement plans, you make contributions and what you get at the end of the contribution stream is what you get.

529s are goal oriented. You tell ESPlanner how much you want to spend from your 529 plan in a particular year and by what year that expense must be fully funded. ESPlanner then figures out how much you have to contribute every year (keeping the contribution constant in today's dollars) to meet that expense and smooths the rest of your economy around the necessary contributions.

529s are "syntactic sugar" on top of the special expenditures/receipts interface (and probably only the first such feature) so the contributions and withdrawals show up in the special expenditures/receipts columns to show the cash flow.

As a convenience the reports also show the actual cash flow from the 529s itself but you will notice that there is no separate 529 column for spending or income.

Depending on how much financial aid you think your child can receive, a 529 may not make sense, so you may have to start a 529, evaluate your child's likely aid picture if you didn't have a 529 available and potentially use the 529 assets to do something else, like pay off a mortgage, and eat the tax penalty. This would make an interesting case study.

Best,

Dick Munroe