5 Crucial Questions to Ask Before Paying for Your Child’s College Education

It’s the time of year when many parents have watched their children graduate from high school. While no doubt proud of their offspring’s achievements, in the back of their heads, all parents wonder about one thing: does my child have good financial habits. As they embark for the first time into that brave new world of adulthood, they’ll also be venturing into the terra incognito of money. Are they prepared?

It’s a challenge for parents to teach their children everything they need to know to ready them for their lives ahead. A good, practical, common sense financial education often falls far to the back of the priority list (though sometimes for good reasons). It shouldn’t. “If there’s one huge gift we as parents can give our kids,” says Jessica Ludvigsen, Sr. Vice President of Retail Banking at Axiom Bank in Orlando, Florida, “it’s the knowledge they need to grow up to be financially stable adults.”

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We are at our best as educators and space-makers for a deeper engagement with the financial world, and all our work with our clients should spur on hope.

Many people in my profession would not make an immediate leap from the late physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking to our work of capital markets, mutual funds and financial planning. This is understandable. Our work in financial advising is overtly pragmatic. It’s either mathematical or fervently personal, with little room for theory or imagining the “why” behind what we do. It is—I suggest—so much like the world of science Hawking was awakened to 50 or more years ago. He watched as the imaginations of his peers went deeply to the practical, to the technological, while he dreamed of deeper questions about how and why.

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