It was an organized tour. Except for 2 1-hour bus rides, the rest of the trip was walking. They walked about 8-10 miles a day. Tour guides & tour organizers didn’t notify the people on the trip that one would need to have on comfortable shoes to walk a mile to the opera, so a bunch of the teenage girls wore fancy shoes. My kid wore flats, but they’re not shoes that she normally walks long distances in.
But whatever.
My kid’s clothes smelled really bad. they were in Manhattan the entire time, mostly around Times Square, went to Broadway a couple of times, and Central Park.
Everybody can take it or leave it with my opinion. I am now sorry I even said anything for all of the drama it created. That was not my intent.
No one is stopping you from taking the money whenever.
So if you get $25K from the fund to you, and pay $5K a month for 5 months, there’s nothing that you will get beat up on. You are not taking out more than you are allowed. Just do it within the same calendar year.
You don’t have to provide anything at all. I think they ask “is this for higher education expenses” or something similar but it’s your responsibility to document it’s use for your taxes in case you’re audited. Just make sure that you pay tuition in the year that you withdraw the money, don’t pull out 529 money in December for a payment in January.
Hi all, dropping in on this thread to see how everyone is holding up. We are in home stretch, we were able to pull off a surprise grad party last night with about forty people. My d was stressed about the weekend with “competing” parties so we put hers first and said WTH, do it on a Tuesday pm. Didn’t stop the fun though, our friends aren’t exactly uptight. Last day of school today sniff sniff.
Grad night tonight til 2 am and I’m bracing for the arrival of my 80 yr old parents. We’re lucky they can attend but let’s just say we don’t exactly align in our beliefs. I’m prepared to hear their 24/7 news network permanently blaring at full volume.
Ceremony is Saturday am. Biting my tongue until then. Send wine.
Your daughter learned the valuable lesson we all had to learn and much easier to learn at 18 than later.
Expect to walk (a lot) in cities. Comfy shoes FTW. Also if you have a cute tote bag, ballet slippers usually fit for a quick change at your final destination.
Final stretch is here for D24. Tonight is prom., then she heads to the mountains for the weekend for prom house festivities. I will be uneasy until she is home Sunday evening.
Monday is sr. picnic, Tuesday is sr. skip day. Classes end on Friday. Graduation on the 21st! The following weekend we’re throwing a joint grad party for her and my D20. If everyone who is invited shows, we’ll have almost 70 ppl. My house is small, I plan to have a large tent set up in the backyard, but a thunderstorm or just beastly hot and humid weather could put a damper on that. I’ll take any nice weather vibes you can send me for the last weekend in June, please!
In other news, D24 still needs to take her math placement exam. She has been assigned a time slot to pick housing, but afaik, she hasn’t done any research on the different dorm options yet. I’m really trying to find that right balance between nagging her and letting her handle things. My D20 was always such an anxious kid that I never had to wonder if she was on top of things…D24 is a whole different animal.
Congrats! My D24 also won the Hunger Games of UGA freshman dorm selection.
She chose a non-Honors College roommate, so she had missed the early HC dorm selection (only good for HC dorm - Meyers). But she felt completely vindicated about making her housing deposit last December within the first 30 seconds that it was open. She was assigned the opening selection time of 9:00am on Tuesday, and she basically had her pick.
From reading the angsty posts on the FB parents’ page, the 2 most popular dorms were unavailable by 1:00 on that first day. Some students won’t pick until mid next week; others still haven’t received their selection time assignment.
Definitely recommend the earliest possible housing deposit for future students! It’s only $35, and it doesn’t commit you to attend. But it paid off this week!!
For ours, I can just go online and request a disbursement, and it is deposited into my bank in a day or two. I think somewhere I check a box to confirm it is for education-related expenses. No documentation of any sort needed.
I was so not looking forward to the dorm selection thing if S24 had gone with UGA! Glad it worked out well for you guys! (I lived in Myers when I went to UGA–back before it was the honors dorm and instead was the dorm with no air conditioning).
Maybe half the dorms didn’t have air in early 1990’s, when I was a student at UGA. We absolutely prioritized our dorm selection first by A/C, then location, then bathroom set up.
I lived in Soule when it was still “new”. Now my D24 will be in same quad, but in the completely rebuilt Rutherford (demolished and rebuilt to modern standards in 2013, but designed to honor the classic architecture).
It’s funny–I got to pick early as an honors program perk, so I picked Myers on purpose. I guess location? I just didn’t want to be in one of the big towers where most of the freshmen were, but, in retrospect, I probably would have made friends more easily over there…Myers was mostly sophomores.
The best perk of Honors in our time was the class registration (after athletes, before everyone else, who registered based on total hours completed). I took Ballroom Dancing for my required PE. Every single woman in the class was in Honors, so it was never available for other women.
But because of pairing, half the class was reserved for men. Most of whom picked the class up in desperation on the last day of drop-add.
Ours apparently wants us to upload a cost statement of some sort before taking out funds for what we claim are qualified expenses, but that may have something to do with the particular structure of the program (this is the PA GSP).
In any event, they will then just send you the money unless you ask for it to be sent to the institution.
S24 graduated about two weeks ago and has been enjoying the summer so far. Visited a few new friends he made at admit weekend and has been to a few concerts. All of a sudden he’s taken up running and has signed up for a half-marathon in August!
He decided kind of late that he wanted a grad party, so we are scrambling to make it happen next week but think it will all work out.
He starts his summer job - 9-5 in an office - on Monday. The pay is quite nice, and so hopefully, he’ll be able to save a good amount before heading to school in the fall.
Looking forward to a nice summer with him. Not looking forward to being an empty nester in the fall…
All the talk of picking dorms, filling out forms, etc. is making me very antsy, because we’ve had pretty much nothing to do for Amherst yet. As far as I can tell, stuff will start happening in “mid-June.” They did send him an e-mail yesterday asking for an official score report for his self reported SAT score from May 2023. The problem is that the May 2023 score isn’t the one he self-reported; he reported his (higher) score from that August. I told him to just send the August one, but he was nervous about it and e-mailed them, and they told him to send both. I’m irrationally annoyed that he has to send them the lower score, too, just because they messed up the date somehow, but whatever. I doubt they’ll rescind his admission for getting better at math over last summer.
