While working overseas my retirement has not gone into a retirement account. Is it going to kill me on the FAFSA?
"According to the FAFSA info here, they will count your nonretirement assets when figuring the EFC. The old Motley Fool forum question I mentioned in my comment suggests asking the school for a ""special circumstances adjustment to your FAFSA"".  I don't know much about it, but googling finds many pages about it at different colleges.  This would seem to be something you need to do individually with whatever school(s) your son winds up considering.  Also, it is up to the school whether to have mercy on you and accept your request. Other than that, you should establish whatever retirement accounts you can and immediately begin contributing as much as possible.  Given that the decision is likely to be complicated by your foreign income, you should seek professional advice from an accountant versed in such matters." Are the schools going to count all my retirement I've saved over the   last 20 years as assets and calculate my EFC on 5.x% of that?! Yes.
In my opinion, the fee is criminal.  There are ETFs available to the public that have expenses as low as .05%. The index fund VIIIX an institution level fund available to large 401(k) plans charges .02%. I'll pay a total of under 1% over the next 50 years,  Consider that at retirement, the safe withdrawal rate has been thought to be 4%, and today this is considered risky, perhaps too high. Do you think it's fair, in any sense of the word to lose 30% of that withdrawal?  Another angle for you - In my working years, I spent most of those years at either the 25% or 28% federal bracket taxable income. I should spend my retirement at 15% marginal rate. On average, the purpose of my 401(k) was to save me (and my wife) 10-13% in tax from deposit to withdrawal. How long does it take for an annual 1.1% excess fee to negate that 10% savings? If one spends their working life paying that rate, they will lose half their wealth to those managing their money.  PBS aired a show in its Frontline series titled The Retirement Gamble, it offers a sobering look at how such fees are a killer to your wealth. I think others have made the key points. Let me just add: As others have pointed out, the traditional IRA is better if your tax rate in retirement is lower than it is when you are building the account. The Roth IRA is better if your tax rate in retirement is higher. For most people, your income in retirement will be lower than your income in most of your working years. On top of that, a significant percentage of your income will come from Social Security, which is generally not taxed, and so the tax rate you pay on the remaining income will be lower still. If you're just starting out, if you're in your 20s, it's likely that your income will go up significantly in the next couple of decades and so you might be making more in retirement that you are now, and so the Roth is probably your better bet. But if you're in your 40s or 50s you are probably making your peak income, you will have much less in retirement, and the traditional IRA is likely better. If your income is well above average and you are saving enough to have a retirement income well above average, then social security may be a very small part of your retirement and my comments on that may not be relevant to you. It's true that tax rates could change in the future. But will they go up or down? It's also possible that the laws about retirement accounts will change. If you think you have some insight into what will happen in the future you may want to take that into account when making plans. But politics is very hard to predict. The Trinity study looked at 'safe' withdrawal rates from retirement portfolios. They found it was safe to withdraw 4% of a portfolio consisting of stocks and bonds. I cannot immediately find exactly what specific investment allocations they used, but note that they found a portfolio consisting largely of stocks would allow for the withdrawal of 3% - 4% and still keep up with inflation. In this case, if you are able to fund $30,000, the study claims it would be safe to withdraw $900 - $1200 a year (that is, pay out as scholarships) while allowing the scholarship to grow sufficiently to cover inflation, and that this should work in perpetuity. My guess is that they invest such scholarship funds in a fairly aggressive portfolio. Most likely, they choose something along these lines: 70 - 80% stocks and 20 - 30% bonds. This is probably more risky than you'd want to take, but should give higher returns than a more conservative portfolio of perhaps 50 - 60% stocks, 40 - 50% bonds, over the long term. Just a regular, interest-bearing savings account isn't going to be enough. They almost never even keep up with inflation. Yes, if the stock market or the bond market takes a hit, the investment will suffer. But over the long term, it should more than recover the lost capital. Such scholarships care far more about the very long term and can weather a few years of bad returns. This is roughly similar to retirement planning. If you expect to be retired for, say, 10 years, you won't worry too much about pulling out your retirement funds. But it's quite possible to retire early (say, at 40) and plan for an infinite retirement. You just need a lot more money to do so. $3 million, invested appropriately, should allow you to pull out approximately $90,000 a year (adjusted upward for inflation) forever. I leave the specifics of how to come up with $3 million as an exercise for the reader. :) As an aside, there's a Memorial and Traffic Safety Fund which (kindly and gently) solicited a $10,000 donation after my wife was killed in a motor vehicle accident. That would have provided annual donations in her name, in perpetuity. This shows you don't need $30,000 to set up a scholarship or a fund. I chose to go another way, but it was an option I seriously considered. Edit: The Trinity study actually only looked at a 30 year withdrawal period. So long as the investment wasn't exhausted within 30 years, it was considered a success. The Trinity study has also been criticised when it comes to retirement. Nevertheless, there's some withdrawal rate at which point your investment is expected to last forever. It just may be slightly smaller than 3-4% per year. It is a very bad idea in almost all circumstances to borrow/withdraw from an IRA (or other retirement account) for a down payment on a house and I would only suggest it as a last resort. Even as a last resort it is a bad idea, and I'd suggest you aren't ready to buy a house until you have enough non-retirement money to do the deal. In your case you have money in savings, you should absolutely do that. If you don't feel comfortable using your emergency fund, you need to keep saving until you can afford to buy a house. Your retirement fund isn't a piggy bank for when you need money now, it is a payment you make to keep a decent lifestyle later in life. When you are retired your options for alternate income streams will be much more limited.  The biggest hidden cost is the opportunity cost of not having that money working for you. Your final retirement balance is very likely (when done correctly) going to be mostly comprised of the return on your investment more so than the money you put in. While you are young your greatest asset is time for that money to grow, don't throw that away when you have viable options! The other problem, if you are talking about an employer plan (401K/Roth) is that if you lose your job you will have 60-90 days to pay back the loan or it will be considered a distribution and subject to taxes plus a 10% early withdrawal penalty. This happened to a bunch of my friends from work when our company got bought by another company forcing them to close the old 401K plan and transfer to the new one. Short version: Don't touch retirement money for non-retirement things unless it is a life/death emergency and you have no other options. These are plans similar to 401k plans. 457(b) plans available for certain government and non-profit organizations, 403(b) available for certain educational, hospital, religious and non-profit organizations. Your school apparently fits into both classes, so it has both. These plans don't have to allow ROTH contributions, but they may, so you have to check if there's an option. The main (but not only) difference from IRA is the limit: for 401(k), 403(b) and 457(b) plans the contribution limit is $17500, while for IRA its $5500 (for 2013). Additional benefit of 457(b) plan is that there's no 10% penalty on early withdrawal, just taxes (at ordinal rates). Smart parents not wanting to get stuck with a student loan or co-signing on a loan.   because rent is so high Are you able to live with your parents?  Is there anyway to reduce the cost of rent like renting a room?  Can you move somewhere where the rent is cheaper? working 25 hours per week Working 25 hours per week and taking 6 hours is a pretty light schedule.  It is not even 40 hours per week.  What is stopping you from working 40 hours and paying for school from your salary?   In my own life I created a pretty crappy situation for myself when I was a young man.  I really wanted to go to a prestigious university, but ended up going to a community college, and then to a university that was lesser known in a less expensive area.  I had to work like crazy, upwards of 50 hours per week.  I also took a full load in a difficult degree program.   You probably don't have to go to the extremes that I went through, but you can work more.  Most adults work at their jobs well more than 40 hours per week, then come home and continue to work (on the house, raising kids, trying to start a side business, etc...).  So you might as well become an adult now. There are ways to become independent from your parents for FAFSA like have a baby, get married, or join the military.  I'd only recommend the last one as you will also receive the GI Bill.  Another option is to try and obtain a job that offers financial aid. Nothing for nothing, everyone is given the opportunity to roll their tax refund into an IRA at tax time. Given the EIC such there is little reason most low income families with children couldn't max out for a few years early on in a target retirement fund. But buying stuff is a much more popular option i guess. I do not know why learning math of money is not given more focus in school rather than other trivial things... "Well.... If you have alllll your money invested, and then there's a financial crisis, and there's a personal crisis at the same time (e.g. you lose your job) then you're in big trouble. You might not have enough money to cover your bills while you find a new job. You could lose your house, ruin your credit, or something icky like that.  Think 2008. Even if there's not a financial crisis, if the money is in a tax-sheltered retirement account then withdrawing it will incur ugly penalities. Now, after you've got an emergency fund established, things are different. If you could probably ride out six to twelve months with your general-purpose savings, then with the money you are investing for the long term (retirement) there's no reason you shouldn't invest 100% of the money in stocks. The difference is that you're not going to come back for that money in 6 months, you're going to come back for it in 40 years. As for retirement savings over the long term, though, I don't think it's a good idea to think of your money in those terms. If you ever lose 100% of your money on the stock market while you've invested in diversified instruments like S&P500 index funds, you're probably screwed one way or another because that represents the core industrial base of the US economy, and you'll have better things to worry about, like looking for a used shotgun. Myself, I prefer to give the suggestion ""don't invest any money in stocks if you're going to need to take it out in the next 5 years or so"" because you generally shouldn't be worried about a 100% loss of all the money in stocks your retirement accounts nearly so much as you should be worried about weathering large, medium-term setbacks, like the dot-com bubble crash and the 2008 financial crisis. I save the ""don't invest money unless you can afford to lose it all"" advice for highly speculative instruments like gold futures or social-media IPOs. Remember also that while you might lose a lot of your money on the stock market, your savings accounts and bonds will earn you pathetic amounts by comparison, which you will slowly lose to inflation. If you've had your money invested for decades then even during a crash you may still be coming out ahead relative to bonds."