The family money newsletter
This week
One of them is a retirement account wearing a baby's name. The other is a college account. We put $150 a month through both for 18 years and the balances land in the same place. Everything that separates them happens at the exit.
Read the breakdown Run your own numbers
Compounding does not care how much goes in. It cares how long it sits. The gap between starting at 0 and starting at 8 is wider than the gap between $1 and $10.
Every calculator asks for 12 inputs and returns a number you do not trust. Here is the 1-line version, and why the policy at work is not it.
You can use almost any state's plan, whatever state you live in. Most dads open the one their bank suggested and pay for it in fees every year until 18.
The same infant room runs $514 a month in Mississippi and $2,123 in DC. Here is every state, plus the 2026 tax rules that shrink the bill.
A baby's Roth IRA cap is $0 until the kid earns real pay. We ran both accounts, plus the 529 to Roth rollover worth up to $35,000.
A parent 529 adds at most 5.64% of its balance to the Student Aid Index. The same money in a UTMA adds 20%. We ran $10,000 and $50,000.
Free guide · Ranked, in order
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Who writes it
We are not financial advisors. Not licensed, not certified, not the smartest people working on this. What we are is obsessed.
Somewhere between the first kid and the second one, family finance became the thing we read about at 11pm instead of sleeping. We went and found the answers because we needed them, not because anyone paid us to.
Every institution out there publishes the comparison and refuses to make the call. Refusing to make the call is the thing we exist to not do.
