529 Webinar - August 2021

Hosted by Paul Curley, CFA, Director of 529 & ABLE Research at ISS Market Intelligence, this webinar provided an overview of the U.S. college financial planning landscape.

Firstly, we reviewed the increasing demand for higher education by families in the United States. Secondly, we evaluated how tuition inflation continues to outpace most workers’ pay increases and, therefore, their ability to pay from their current incomes. The combination of these factors results in a widening of the college affordability gap between cost and ability to pay and, furthermore, leads to rising levels of student loan debt to fill that gap. This trend has created multiple downstream issues within the context of goal-based investing. It is here that we started to present both the concept of saving and that of saving efficiently with 529 plans as the solution to the widening college affordability gap.

Additionally, the session covered updates in 529 and ABLE plans from a 2Q 2021 market data, legislative, product, marketing and distribution perspective.