This has been a hot topic of late in our household, as we have just enrolled our daughter into primary school and high school. When we started looking into the costs of each type of schooling, we realised that there is no such thing as “free education”. There are plenty of extra costs such as uniforms, books, sports, and music; as well as, tutoring costs, as many children will need some additional help with their studies.
Check out the ASG education cost calculator that help parents estimate the potential cost of their child’s education—from preschool through to university. The cost of sending your kid to school from preschool to Year 12 at a Government school is over $70,000, a Catholic school will set you back over $300,000 and Independent schooling is over $600,000!
A serious reality check for any parent! Looking at these figures really made us realise that we needed to start saving early.
What to do?
Saving now for a child’s education is so important, especially since you don’t know what’s going to happen in say 5, 10, 15 years time financially, at least you can start saving now to help relieve some of the pressure once the kids start school.
How do you begin saving?
The traditional way of saving is of course opening a savings account. Every bank will have an account specifically for children and more often than not, will be offering a higher rate than a standard bank account. BUT (there is always a but) many of these high interest rate accounts come with some T&C’s (as always) and one of those T&C’s is that if you don’t meet the minimum deposit amount or you make a withdrawal, the rate drops from that higher interest rate to basically 0%!
What other options are there?
I was lucky enough to come across ASG at a blogger event that I recently attended. I hadn’t heard of ASG before, but once I got chatting to them, I quickly realised this is what we needed as a family and for our daughter’s future educational needs.
ASG is solely dedicated to supporting a child’s educational journey. With over 40 years experience and supporting 520,000 children’s education, ASG know what they are doing.
Once I chatted to their team member, I found them helpful in getting a better understand on how it all works and the different options they can offer us as a family.
From $2 per day, we could start saving and investing in our daughter’s education.
Initially I was a bit worried that we were going to be stuck in a “locked in” contract or over-commit ourselves financially. Given that I am working part time and planning to have a second child at some point, I wouldn’t want to get us in a position where we couldn’t afford to meet the contributions or for some reason, we needed the funds back for an emergency. This is where ASG’s newest fund – Pathway Education Fund was the kind of option that would suit our family.
What attracted us to the Pathway Education Fund is the flexibility and freedom it offers. We can increase or decrease our contributions, starting at just $2 per day. The fund is tax effective and you can choose when you want the contributions returned to you. We are able to save, without feeling restricted or locked into something we can’t afford.
Being apart of ASG also gives us access to educational tools for our child, and offers and discounts to help further her education.
I’m sure if you’re like me, you have a ton of other questions so don’t hesitate to jump on the ASG website to find out more.
Their Facebook page also has numerous articles around education that would be of interest to any parent.
Brought to you by ASG
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