Making it Easy for Family & Friends to Gift Into a 529 Plan
By Nancy Miller Herbert
Higher education has always been one of the most significant expenses a familiy can face. As college costs have skyrocketed, that burden has become harder for parents to bear on their own – prompting more and more families to turn to relatives and friends to help fund their children's educations.
Enter Ugift, an easy, free-to-use service that facilitates the crowdfunding of 529 higher education savings accounts. Through Ugift, a 529 account owner (typically a student’s parent) provides a unique Ugift code to a donor (for example, a grandparent), which allows the donor to set up an electronic funds transfer ("ETF") from their bank account directly into the student's 529 plan. The donor can also create a Gift Giver profile on the Ugift system to establish a recurring gifting schedule.
Ugift works with all 529 plan accounts that are administered by Ascensus. A list of Ascensus-administered 529 plans can be found at this link.
Many of Newground's clients use the 529 Plan offered through Schwab, which is through the state of Kansas and named the Learning Quest 529 Education Savings Program. This particular plan is administered by Ascensus. To find out which other state 529 plans are administered by Ascensus, you can search by state name by clicking here.
To learn more about Ugift, please see their FAQ page.
Nancy Miller Herbert is Newground's Director of Operations.
Note: This material is intended for educational purposes only. As with all our public writing, blog posts do not constitute tax, financial planning, or investment advice; likewise, they are neither an offer to sell nor solicitation to buy any investment or security.
