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So you’re sending a kid to college

by | Blog

A graduation cap after being thrown into the air - Bold Vision FInancial

So you’re sending a kid to college!  Congratulations to you both!  With all the focus on paying for college itself, sometimes the smaller picture items fall through the cracks.  Here are some financial to-do’s for you and your student:

  1. Young Adult Powers of Attorney
    1. Without these forms, it is very challenging to access your child’s medical and financial records after age 18.
    2. We had a good experience with MamaBear legal forms.
    3. You can get 20% off the standard price of $79 with code Fearless20 (just a discount code for our clients – not a referral link).
    4. You can do two sets of forms for that price (home state + state they are attending college)
    5. The forms don’t take long to fill out, BUT be sure to leave time to get them signed.  You need the student, anyone named on the POA, TWO witnesses, and a notary.  In our experience, most notaries at the bank or similar will NOT allow employees to be witnesses, so you need to “BYOW”.  If you live in Chicago, Amy is a notary, so feel free to reach out if I can help.
  2. College Student Renter’s Insurance
    1. For my daughter living on campus freshman year, it was $212 for the year, which includes:
  • $10,000 of property (including any bicycles, cellphone, clothing, computer, textbooks)
  • $100K of liability
  • $100 deductible
    1. She’s covered on our homeowners, but our deductible is so high that it wouldn’t really help for something smaller.  This covers for water damage, theft, fire and smoke damage.
    2. It took less than 5 minutes to sign up.
  1. Away at school auto insurance discount.  If your child drives and will not have access to your household car(s) while at school, call your auto insurer and let them know your student will be away and not have access to the household car(s) – you can often get at least a small refund.
  2. Have them freeze their credit.  If you did it for them when they were minors, it will expire automatically at age 18.  This was the most difficult step for us as (especially with Experian) as there is not as much data on the child to be able to confirm identity. Here are the links they will need.  You may need to help them with this.
    1. Equifax
    2. TransUnion
    3. Experian

Best of luck to you and your kiddos at this very exciting time!