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If you’ve been reading Money Abroad since 2023 (thank you!), you’ll notice less and less expat finance editions over time.

This has been intentional.

But I’m very much still writing about money, especially on topics I’m personally dealing with. I hope these resources can help some of you in a similar stage of life. And for those ahead of me, I’d love to hear your honest feedback! 😄 

Today, in 5 minutes or less, you’ll learn:

• 📈 Why college might cost $663k in 20 years (and what to do about it)

• 🗺️ How to create education funding flexibility across the US & Australia

• 🎯 The exact strategies, accounts and providers we're using (and why)

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👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 How we’re planning kid education finances

Would you rather send your kid to an international, local/public, or home school?

That’s a question my wife and I struggle with as an Australian and American respectively.

Recently, I shared my top priorities for 2024 year-end finances.

Planning for kid education expenses is up there.

We don’t know exactly when we’ll have kids, but we still attempted to craft a realistic plan.

We’re grateful to be citizens of the US and Australia, which creates multiple options.

In this newsletter, I share how we researched and crafted a plan for financially supporting our future kid education expenses.

📍 Goals

We started off with creating 3 kid-related financial goals:

• University Education Fund - Our aim is to create optionality for our kid. While it’s difficult to predict the future perceived value of college/university education in 20ish years, we want to avoid the scenario that it’s highly valuable, our kid can take advantage, but our kid cannot afford it. We chose a 529 savings plan.

• K-12 Private Education Fund - We plan to spend several years living abroad, so this fund would cover enrollment in an international school or alternative education program, e.g. Boundless Education. We’re using a taxable brokerage account earmarked for this purpose.

• Childbirth and Living Expenses - We started a sinking fund for pregnancy, childbirth, and kid’s first year living expenses.

Note: This isn’t meant to be exhaustive—just a manageable set of goals to start with.

Also to avoid writing a financial novel, I’ll skip the living expenses in this edition.

Now let’s get into the nitty-gritty of the “how”:

🧑‍🎓 University Education Expenses

How much did university cost for me and my wife?