sacchi

For any students planning to attend Dickinson, it may be worth considering putting your college fund money into the Independent 529 Plan. It offers a 4% tuition discount for each year that your money is invested, in addition to keeping up with normal tuition inflation. For example, if you invest 1 year's worth of tuition now, 3 years from now that would buy you 1.12 years worth of tuition.

Dickinson College - News Release
Independent 529 Plan

I'm not affiliated with either Dickinson or the Independent 529 Plan. I'm just a parent with S's college fund invested with the Independent 529 Plan, trying to pick out potential schools to visit over spring break, paying particular attention to I529 member colleges, and chanced to notice this. Most schools offer a 0.5% or 1% per year tuition discount, so Dickinson's 4% discount is surprisingly large. They must be using it as a way to attract more full-pay students.

I529 Plan is great if you know that your kid will go to a member college. No 30-50% drop in value over the last year, unlike a lot of other investment choices...

rodney

Do you know what they are guaranteeing this year if you attend a non-member institution? Last year when my daughter was deciding, one of her schools was not a member and we were told that they guarantee 2% if you withdraw for a non-member college.....given last year's performance of other 529 plans, that was amazing....wondering if they are still guaranteeing that....

btw, she ended up attending a member institution, we transferred another 529 into the independent and junior and senior year tuition is done.....so happy; trying to figure out if we should transfer younger daughter's money into it (but she doesn't have a college list yet!!)


sacci: btw, that means your senior year is taken care of for your child.....assuming Dickinson doesn't have a plan where you can fix your tuition for 4 years, it makes sense....not sure if it does if you can prepay up front.....

sacchi

I believe that they cap the return to being between a 2% loss and a 2% gain per year, if you do not attend a member college. Given the recent losses in the stock market, a 2% loss sounds pretty good right now.

I've got two kids and split the college money into an I529Plan and a regular 529, one per kid. They are transferable within a family, and I figured my odds were good that one of the two kids would end up at a member college. The regular 529 is down a huge amount, so the I529 plan is doing great in comparison.