FYF

My wife and I just had our very first discussion about exactly how we are going to disburse our daughter's First Year Fund, which is the money we've set aside for her first year out of high school, whether it be living at home, travel, or college. The good news is that we mostly agree. The bad news is that we don't entirely agree.

Basically, we agree that if she wants to go to college right after high school, and needs money to fund it, we'll help her up to the limit of the FYF. Since we're planning for the FYF to be at $75,000 by that time, we think it'll be able to fund one year at a pretty good school, or two - three years at a less well known school.

We agree that if she wants to go to college, but to take some amount of time off before doing so, we are willing to fund her expenses, within reason, for that period. Within reason is vague, but it generally means food, clothing, and expenses in the area. If she decides that she'd like to jet out to Oregon or down to Baja, we're going to have to talk about it.

We agree that if she wants to do something structured just to try it, like learning to be a professional artist, we're willing to fund a year of trying it.

We kind of agree that if she really doesn't know what she wants to do out of high school, we're going to let her take a year to decide, but that during that year she's going to have to do things to structure the answers to that question, by which we mean research, taking the occasional dissimilar college courses, and forth. If it turns out that she gets toward the end of the year and still doesn't know, we're going to tell her that she needs to be looking for a job, too. (This is our least favorite option.)

Where we're the least sure is if she does want to go to college, isn't sure when, and wants to do something fairly drastic, like taking six months to hike through Europe. To be honest, we don't think we'd let an eighteen year old kid go do something like that until she's really, really mature -- and possibly not even then. Scaling it back, if she wants to travel throughout the United States -- we're not sure.

Good thing we have time. The FYF's not going anywhere.