529 Plans, 401(k) Plans, and Using Any Extra Money From Washington

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In this podcast, Motley Fool personal finance expert Robert Brokamp speaks with Martha Kortiak Mert of Savingforcollege.com about the newly expanded uses of 529s and how to choose the right plan for you.
Also in this episode:
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How does your 401(k) compare to the average worker's?
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What you should do with any "raise" you'll receive from the "one big, beautiful bill."
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This podcast was recorded on July 25, 2025.
Robert Brokamp: How should you choose 529 plan? How do you compare it to the average 401K participant? You're listening to the weekend Personal Finance edition of Motley Fool Money. I'm Robert Brokamp. We're doing a trial run of something a bit different for our Saturday episodes in which per usual, we feature a guest interview, and this week, I speak with Martha Kortiak Mert of savingforcollege.com about the newly expanded uses of 529's and how to choose the right plan for you. But then I'll also offer some other personal finance tidbits and tricks. Let's kick things off with three items from the news in a segment we're calling last week in Money. First up, they say that comparison is the thief of joy. But that doesn't stop us from doing it, especially when it comes to our bunny. If you're curious how your 401K behavior stacks up to the average workers, Vanguard has some answers, and it's recently released, How America Saves Report, based on analysis of all the retirement plans with the firm in 2024. Here are some highlights. The amount you have in your 401K is highly dependent on how long you've been contributing.
Here are the median account balances based on job tenure. For people who have been on the job for 2-3 years, the median account balance is a bit more than $20,000, 4-6 years, a bit more than $44,000, 7-9, almost $73,000, and more than 10 years, almost $166,000. How much are workers contributing to their accounts? Well, the median savings rate is 6.8% just from the worker, and it's 11.5% when you include the employer match. Now, that's below the 15% savings rate that really most experts recommend nowadays, which means many folks might be behind in saving for retirement. Those workers might consider maxing out their accounts, and the limit this year is 23,500. Then when they turn 50, contributing even more with catchup contributions up to $7,500 or starting this year, 11,250 if you're 60-63 years old. What percentage of workers with Vanguard 401Ks took full advantage of their accounts last year? Well, 14% max out their accounts, and 16% of the 15 and older crowd made catch up contributions.
Of course, it really doesn't matter how you compare to the average person. What really matters is whether you're on track to retire, when and how you want. To figure that out, you can start by using a good online calculator. One to consider is the CalcXML comprehensive retirement planning module. Just do an online search for it. You'll know you've found it if it has 606 as the last three numbers in its URL. Next item on our agenda, article from the Wall Street Journal, Jason Zweig, who highlighted the woes of small cap stocks. Over the past century, small caps have outperformed large caps by two percentage points annually on average, but not so much recently. In his article, Zweig cited the following staff from Steven DeSantis and Equity Strategist at Jeffrey's. Small caps have trailed large caps by more than seven percentage points over the last decade, which is the widest gap since 1935. Accordingly, money is just flowing out of ETFs that invested small US stocks while money is just pouring into the ETFs attract US large companies. This also means that small caps are a good bit cheaper.
The Russell 2000 Index of small companies trades at a price to earnings multiple that is almost nine points lower than the S&P 500 PE. Iger argues, it might be time to go against the grade and grab some bargains by buying some small caps, which you can do pretty easily with a low cost ETF, such as the Vanguard Russell 2000 ETF, Ticker VTWO or the iShares CR S&P Small Cap ETF, Ticker IJR. Finally, we come to the number of the week, and that number is $435,300. That is the median price of an existing home that was sold in June an all time high, according to a report published last week by the International Association of Realtors, but while prices are up, sales volume is actually down 2.7%, and year over year inventory is up more than 15%. There's a bit of a slowdown in the real estate market. Growth of prices has boderated somewhat this year, and it took a bit of a dip in 2022. But anyone who owns a home that they bought more than a few years ago is likely sitting on some pretty nice gains. According to the Case Shiller National Home Price Index, home prices are up 49% over the past five years, 91% over the past decade, and 146% since the bottom of the housing crash in February of 2012.
Putting a kid through college can easily cost well over $100,000. One way to prepare for that cost is by contributing to a 529 college savings plan. But how do you choose the right one? Here to provide some pointers is Martha Kortiak Mert, author and COO at savingforcollege.com. Martha, welcome to Motley Fool Money.
Martha Kortiak Mert: Hello. Thanks for having me.
Robert Brokamp: The benefit of 529 savings plans is that the growth and withdrawals are tax free, as long as the money is used for qualified expenses, and that used to mean pretty much just college costs. But the list of qualified expenses just keeps growing, including this month, thanks to the big beautiful bill that was passed on July 4. Let's start by telling us a little bit about what a 529 can actually be used for.
Martha Kortiak Mert: Sure thing, and you're right. That list is actually pretty long right now. Let's start with when your child is young. A few years ago, added to the list of qualified expenses was K-12 tuition. But with the passage of the one big beautiful bill, you now pay for a lot more than just tuition at the K-12 level. You can pay for curricular materials, online materials, private tutoring. You can also once your kid is in high school, you can pay for things like standardized tests, SAT exams, ACT. Those were things that people would often ask about, can I use my 529 plan to pay for this. Finally, the answer now is yes. At the K through 12 level, withdrawals have been limited to $10,000 per year per beneficiary. That is going up to $20,000 per year starting in January. That's just at the K-12 level. Then once you get post post secondary education, you can pay for college tuition, room and board, books, supplies, computers, software, things that you need for your course of study. But in addition, you can also pay for trade schools. You can pay for vocational education. Now you can pay for a range of credentialing and accreditations and continuing education as well. This can include things like welding certification programs, HVAC. There are a number of different programs that are now going to be considered eligible expenses for 529 plans, as well as, again, if you're in law school, if you study to become an accountant, any studies that you're doing for your certification or your accreditation, like a CPA exam or bar exam, you can also now use a 529 plan to pay for those exam fees as well as educational courses that you're doing for those exams.
Robert Brokamp: A much broader range of uses. That might appealing to anyone who's listening to this, so they think, OK, I maybe should open a 529. The interesting thing is, though, they're unique. If you want to open an IRA, you'd have to decide, well, yeah, I can go to Schwab or Vanguard or Fidelity or whatever. But with 529, they're operated by states. You're like, well, do I go with Virginia or Utah or Alaska? How should someone go about choosing the right 529 for their student? Because you don't have to stick with your own states plan.
Martha Kortiak Mert: No, absolutely. This creates a lot of confusion for people and it gives them a lot of choices, which can be a good thing, but sometimes too many choices makes things hard. For one thing, we suggest look at your states plan. Now almost 40 states offer some type of state tax benefit. Most of the time, you have to use your state's 529 plan to get the tax benefit, but not in all cases. Check if you are in a state where you have state income tax, check to see if your state offers a deduction or a credit for contributions that you make to a 529 plan and whether or not you have to use your own states plan to get that. If you are not in a state that offers a tax benefit, and even if you are in one that offers, check out and see, we actually have an article one our site that breaks us down how much is available and you can say, what's the actual benefit? You can see how much is that worth to you and look around and look at how different plans are rated. If you're in a state that maybe doesn't have the highest performing 529 plan. If your 529 plan doesn't offer some of the options that you'd be looking for to invest in, shop around, see what else is out there. There are close to 100, 529 plans of different kinds out there. About half of them or maybe a little over half are direct sold, meaning you can just go to the website and open those yourself. The remaining ones have to be opened for you by a financial advisor or broker.
Robert Brokamp: You can transfer money from one 529 to another. Can you try to game the system? Can you like, I'm going to contribute to my state's mediocre plan to get that tax break, but then I'm going to transfer it to another 529, or is there a catch there somewhere?
Martha Kortiak Mert: No catch. You can totally do that. The other thing that happens is people move states sometimes, so maybe you open your states plan for that tax benefit, then you move to another state. Depending where you're moving, you could transfer that money, or you can just keep it where it is and open a new 529 plan in that new state if that offers a tax benefit, as well. They're actually really flexible in that way. There's no reason that you only have to open one 529 plan if you have more than one child. It's probably a good idea to open a different one for each child. But for sure, you can max out your tax savings in your state tax benefit, and then open an additional one.
Robert Brokamp: You mentioned ratings of 529 plans. A few people do it Morningstar does it, but you all do it at saving for college.com as well. What are some of the criteria you use when it comes to how you've ranked and rated 529 plans?
Martha Kortiak Mert: Yeah, let's start with the rankings, because that sort of feeds into our overall ratings, as well. Our rankings are an analysis we do of how all the 529 plans perform, so what their investment returns have been. Now, of course, within a 529 plan, you have multiple choices of how to invest your money. You can choose from portfolio options that are, give you age based or target year options. You choose the one that corresponds to your child's age or the expected age of enrollment in college, and those funds will shift over time from more aggressive type of investments to more conservative investments as your child nears college age. But they also offer different single fund and static blends and things like that. You do have quite a range of investment options. How do we compare the performance of one 529 plan to another 529 plan? We have to find a way to normalize those things. What we do is, in this case, we look just at the age based and year of enrollment portfolios, and we basically calculate an average across the age range. What would your average return be at any given point in time from 0-18 plus years of age? Then we compare that average performance for all the different plants. That's how we rank which are the best performing 529 plans. That performance component is definitely a big component for people.
When we think about the rating and how we rate 529 plans, we want to be able to rate them based on which are the plans that are going to most help you as a parent, as a grandparent, ensure that you're reaching your goals for your child or your grandchild. Their performance is a big element of that, but we also think about things like saving success. That means, does the plan offer different types of features that will enable you to save more? This can include things like, does it have a gifting feature? How easy is it for you to if your parent have grandparents, family and friends on birthdays and holidays, make gift contributions into the 529 plan in lieu of a toy, for example. Ease of use. How easy is it to enroll in the plan? This is a place a lot of people drop off during the enrollment process because they really just get stuck. It's hard for them to figure out what these different options are that are being offered, and ultimately program delivery. How likely do we think it is that a 529 program manager is going to continue to deliver excellence to their investors? Those are some of the things we look at. We use both publicly available information, and we also survey all the 529 plan program administrators with a series of questions that they provide answers to us.
Robert Brokamp: You mentioned various relatives there. Some people may wonder, well, how does a 529 affect my financial aid eligibility? It comes down really to ownership. Tell us a little bit about the different financial aid treatment when the parent owns it versus the kid or maybe another relative like the grandparent.
Martha Kortiak Mert: A 529 plan is considered on the financial aid form, the FAFSA form that you fill out for federal financial aid. Whether it's owned by the parent or the student, it is considered a parent asset. A maximum of 5.64% of that asset value is included in the FAFSA form, ultimately. You put the full amount, but what's actually considered in the calculation is just up to 5.64%. Basically, if you're saving in any way, whether that money is in mutual funds or in a bank account, that's going to be considered at the same rate. If you can save, that's not a reason to not open a 529 plan. If a grandparent is considering whether to contribute to the parents 529 plan or to open their own, the good news for grandparents now is that a grandparent 529 is not considered for financial aid purposes. Now, in the past, it used to be withdrawals that you made from a grandparent 529 plan and then used to help the student were considered as untaxed student income.
That was considered at a much higher rate, I think that was 20%. That has gone away. That untaxed income is no longer considered. Any cash support that's provided to the student from a grandparent or a family friend or other family member, that is not considered on the FAFSA. It does give an additional bump for grandparents that are trying to decide whether or not to open a 529 plan. The other thing to consider, too, or just to be aware of, really, if the parents are divorced, only one parent is filing the FAFSA form. That is the parent who provides most of the financial support to the student. If both parents have a 529 plan, the other parent, the 529 plan that they have for that same student would also not be reported on the FAFSA.
Robert Brokamp: The whole grandparent thing, to me, feels like a huge loophole. It's basically completely ignored for financial aid purposes. Do you know why they made that change?
Martha Kortiak Mert: I know that over time. I don't know exactly why that change was made. I know it was something, though, that had caused a lot of confusion over time. There was a whole strategy and loophole around how to use grandparent funds to pay for college without affecting financial aid, and so it used to be you would wait until the sophomore year to start withdrawing from a grandparent 529. There was a loophole there already, and a lot of people were aware of it, and that's gone away now, essentially, so I think made it a lot easier overall.
Robert Brokamp: I say grandparent, but it's really anyone other than the parent doesn't have to be a grandparent. Let's move on to the final question. Are there any underappreciated or lesser known aspects of 529 accounts or just saving for college in general that you think more people should know about?
Martha Kortiak Mert: Yeah. People are so concerned about what happens if I don't use it. I think especially in this day and age, where there is so much focus and emphasis on the value of a college degree, is it still worthwhile, especially given the student debt picture? A lot of people, they have a lot of uncertainty and trepidation around opening a 529 plan. For one thing, I do think that this expansion of benefits does help a lot because now you can say, look, your child is probably going to need something post high school, right, to make it in today's world. If that's not college, it's going to be something else. Really, there's not a great reason to not open a 529 plan. The other thing, we didn't really talk about, which I think people are aware of, but if you think about that tax benefit that you get of a 529 plan, we just focused on the state tax benefits.
But of course, the really big benefit of a 529 plan is that those withdrawals that you're making come out federal tax free and state tax free. As long as it's being spent on qualified education expenses, we went through that list earlier. It's a pretty expansive list. That can add up to thousands of dollars. You could put the money in a mutual fund. You're going to be taxed along the way. In the case of a 529 plan, all that tax is deferred, and you are going to have to pay thousands of dollars every time you're taking withdrawals are. You're going to pay the capital gains tax rate, I should say. Depending on how much you have in there and how much you've earned over time, you're basically, you can't count on every dollar that you see in your account going to pay for college. With 529 plans, I think that's really the beauty of it that every dollar, when you go and look at your account statement online, every dollar that you see there can go toward education, and that's pretty huge. I think there are other flexibilities, you can transfer to another beneficiary if you end up. If you're in the enviable position of having more in your 529 plan than you need. The other actually pretty recent development that we didn't talk about that is huge is if you do end up with leftover money in your 529 plan. You can now transfer up to $35,000 to a Roth IRA for your beneficiary. You have to do it within the Roth IRA rules. You can only transfer so much up to the transfer limit each year. But that's a great way to jump start your kids retirement savings, as well. If you end up not spending or not spending all the money. I really encourage people to not delay, start early, put money away regularly. It's just I've heard from so many parents, friends of mine that say, I didn't get it. I didn't start saving until middle school, and I didn't understand the value of the compounding I would get if I'd started 10 years earlier, eight years earlier or something. You start early, you're going to use those funds one way or another.
Robert Brokamp: Martha, this has been great. Thank you for joining us.
Martha Kortiak Mert: Thank you so much.
Robert Brokamp: It's time for our final segment. Get it done. In which we provide an actionable tip to make the boast of your bunny. A few weeks ago President Trump signed into law the one big beautiful bill, and there's a lot in that bill's 870 pages, including a higher standard deduction, a higher state and local taxes deduction, a bonus deduction for seniors, a higher child tax credit, and a deduction for tips received by some workers. But it's not all about the breaks. The bill also eventually eliminates energy efficiency tax credits, limits student loan repayment options, and make some cuts to social welfare programs. But hey, whalers get a higher deduction for whaling related expenses, so that's nice. In the end, how much the new tax law will reduce your tax bill will depend on all factors, including your income, job, your age, your address, things like that. But most middle to upper income households could see their after tax incomes rise 2-4% annually over the next few years. Think of it like a raise. With any raise, it's a good idea to be proactive about what you do with that extra money.
My recommendation is to use most or even all of it to boost your savings rate, especially if you're behind in saving for retirement or any other goals. Right after you're done, listening to this podcast, log into your 401K, IRA, brokerage account, or your high yield savings account, and boost the amount that you have automatically contributed by a few percentage points. Because down the road, you may need that money. Estimates vary, but the big beautiful bill could increase the federal budget deficit by three trillion to $6 trillion over the next decade. Meanwhile, it could move up the depletion of the Social Security Trust Fund a year earlier to 2032, and around that same time, one of the trust funds that supports Medicare will run dry. In other words, over the next several years, the federal government will be borrowing even more money while two of its biggest and most important programs will become increasingly underfunded. Make the most of your tax cuts. Use that extra money to plump up your portfolio, because at some point, Uncle Sam is going to have to shore up Social Security, Medicare, and the rest of his finances, possibly resulting in higher future taxes and/or reduced retirement benefits. That's a show. What do you think of this new format for Saturday? Email your feedback to podcasts at fool.com.
That's a podcast with an s at fool.com. As always, people on the program may have interest in the stocks they talk about, and the Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against, so don't buy or sell stocks based solely on what you hear. All personal finance content follows Motley Fool editorial standards and is not approved by advertisers. Advertisements are sponsored content and provided for informational purposes only. You see, our full advertising disclosure, please check out our show notes. I'm Robert Brokamp. Fool on, everybody.