Should a person be able to use their college fund on whatever they want?
The national US student debt is currently standing at an astronomical $1.75 trillion dollars, with over 40 million borrowers. This amount of debt leaves borrowers at a disadvantage as soon as they’re coming out of college.
Of those who go on to pursue higher education, some of them will be lucky enough to have financial aid provided, in some form, from family or loved ones. Some parents will start a college fund for their children from birth so that they can offer aid once they’re ready to go to college.
These realities were highlighted in a recent online post in which a young woman begs her mother to hand over the college fund so that the daughter can purchase a new home, and the mother refuses.
Should a person be able to use their college fund on whatever they want?
An online post published on October 3rd, reported on by Leonie Helm from Newsweek, has gone viral with an incredible 18,700 upvotes and 6,400 comments.
The author begins her post by explaining that she and her husband ‘started adding to college funds every month for each of their kids’ as soon as they found out they were pregnant. Her husband has a very good job, so the college funds are quite hefty.
These funds were kept under wraps from their four kids, as it ‘didn’t feel necessary’ to let the children know it existed. With that said, now one of their children is preparing for college soon, this knowledge has become exposed.
Their eldest child, 22 years old, had a baby at 16 years old, and currently has two children with a third on the way. The young woman and her partner are engaged, without any real plans to get married until they can ‘afford to do so’.
Is purchasing property just as important as college?
The young mother got ‘really excited’ by the news and ‘went to tell her fiancé about it’. The author was very confused by her reaction, and then clarified to her daughter that she ‘couldn’t just have the money’, because it was meant for school. Her daughter got very upset and stormed out of the house.
The author and her husband are considering taking the unused funds from their 22-year-old’s planned education and split it between the three other children who still had plans to attend college. But that was when the daughter called her mother ‘crying and begging’ for her to release the funds so that she could ‘finally afford a down payment and maybe even a wedding’.
The author again refused, saying that the 22-year-old could have the money if she went back to school, and if there was any leftover, she could use it ‘however she wanted’. Ultimately, she clarified to her daughter that the fund was the parent’s money, and thus those were the conditions to access it.
What do you think? Were the author’s conditions completely valid, considering she and her husband were kind enough to put money aside to begin with? Or should the author let her daughter just use the college fund as she pleases, since the money was meant to go to her in the end?
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