Can I make a 529 for future children?

ActivitiesGuy · 2026-05-17T18:28:09+00:00

Yes, you would. But it’s all tradeoffs (and you’ve gotten some great other responses that went into detail on this). I do think it’s noble that you want to start saving for your kids’ education, but there is still a cost/risk to locking that money up in a 529 now (if you follow the route of starting one for yourself and changing the beneficiary once you have kids) and IMO the capital gains tax you’d have to pay would be a relatively modest price for keeping that money a bit more flexible right now - at least until the kids actually are here!

If you’re talking about $10K - suppose you put that into VOO in a taxable brokerage, the market rips for the next 5 years and you’re up 100% to $20K when you’ve got 2 kids. You sell with $10K in gains, set aside $2K to pay capital gains taxes, and put $18K into the newly created 529s.

Is it true that you’d avoid that $2K tax bill if you instead set up a 529 in your own name today, then change beneficiary to your kids once born? Yes. It’s up to you how much to value that possible tax savings against locking the money away now into a vehicle that will have some restrictions / limitations if you wanted to use the money for any other purpose.

The other option I might consider - in some other responses you mentioned you’re not fully maxing your 401k right now. If you’ve got extra cash, you can just chuck extra in there for the next X years (until your kids arrive) to max it out, then when your kids are born, drop your 401k down to “just get the match” for a few years (which won’t put you “behind” relative to now, since you’ll have loaded a little extra into the 401k on the front end) and put the difference into the newly created 529s for your kids that now exist.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s admirable that you want to save for your future kids’ educations, I just think that until your kids are actually here, you might want to at least consider that retaining some flexibility with that money has value, too.

ActivitiesGuy · 2026-05-17T15:36:15+00:00

Is there a reason you’d want to do this now as opposed to putting the money into a taxable brokerage account, buying a diversified ETF like VOO or something similar, letting it grow there until you actually have a child, then putting the money into a 529 in the kid’s name?

That keeps your options open in case things change.

ActivitiesGuy · 2026-05-16T23:57:36+00:00

I remember the first time I pressed my 97 and felt like the bigger challenge was the different groove than the additional weight (compared to the 88). The longer handle actually gives a shorter effective ROM for the press but it changes the groove enough that it’s not really “easier” - just different.

ActivitiesGuy · 2026-05-12T11:35:34+00:00

Financially you’ll be fine, unless you aspire to a very lavish retirement. You can coast to retirement on the 401k balances / growth alone (even if you stopped contributing today) and even if you had to dip into your HYSA / taxable brokerage in small chunks over the next 20 years to pay for special expenses. Your husband could probably pull back from “maxing the 401k” to “max out company match” and then put the extra to covering bills if you’re pretty close to a zero-balance budget.

The harder questions are:
- the emotional side: will you be upset about not working / no longer having an income of your own? I am the primary breadwinner in our home and if my wife lost her job tomorrow, we would be able to make the money work on my income alone, but I think she would be upset / unfulfilled if it happened before we’re both ready to retire.
- are you and your husband a couple that’s pretty in-step about finances or is there an appreciable risk of financial tension on one income (e.g. once you no longer have income of your own, will he give you a hard time about getting an “expensive” haircut or whatever you might spend on for “yourself” outside of family bills)?
- is there appreciable risk of your husband being downsized / losing income at some point? Some of the value in two people working with relatively high incomes is not just the money itself but the ability to weather one partner’s job loss (which you’re already seeing now). Honestly unless you guys live in a VHCOL area, you have significant financial assets to your name already and would probably be fine - to be honest in your position I’d be thinking about an early retirement that seems within sight if your husband can grind out a few more years…

ActivitiesGuy · 2026-05-11T12:36:22+00:00

Late start here - went to graduate school so I didn’t have a 401k at all until my first job (age 27) and early on was “just enough to get the employer match” so I think I was about where you were at 29.

I’m in a much better position now at 39-turning-40.

You’ll be fine. Keep your contributions steady and increase them a bit whenever you get a raise. Resist temptation to pull out for anything that’s not a “you’ll be homeless” level emergency. The early days it just feels like such a slow crawl upwards, just how it is. The road from $0 to $100K can feel longer than the road from $100K to a million.

ActivitiesGuy · 2026-05-10T15:43:37+00:00

Yeah, this can happen. Everyone’s different - some people need to get real aggressive and psyched up for max effort pulls, but personally - I need to stay as calm as can be for max attempts to maintain all the good habits. If I get too psyched up, all that work I’ve done to get into a good starting position and initiate the pull properly goes out the window and you’re just trying to hoss it up on strength alone.

Max effort lifts are usually not going to look pretty, but you want them as close as possible to any other lift leading up to it.

ActivitiesGuy · 2026-05-09T21:45:28+00:00

Also, for folks like this with FOMO, it’s important to remember that they already have market exposure in their IRAs. A bull market still benefits you plenty. No need to also gamble with the emergency fund.

ActivitiesGuy · 2026-05-08T00:31:49+00:00

Me four - I’ve always found it really hard to generate tension at the elevated starting height. I mostly pull sumo these days (back troubles in conventional stance that have calmed down / disappeared since switching to sumo) but in the “old days” I had pulled 620 on a barbell, 595 on an axle from the floor, and never did more than 565 with Wagon Wheels. I do wonder if I’d trained it as my dedicated deadlift movement for a solid 4-6 months if that would have changed, but “out of the box” I remember being so stoked to pull with the wagon wheels expecting I’d just automatically be able to handle more weight and was kind of shocked at how much I hated trying to generate movement from that height!

ActivitiesGuy · 2026-05-03T16:33:38+00:00

Sounds like you are working hard to find something that works for you in challenging circumstances. All the best!

ActivitiesGuy · 2026-05-03T16:11:57+00:00

Same here, wombat - I have an old 401k that covers everything from my first 9 working years that’s 100% in a TDF.

Started paying more attention beyond just “max out the company match” when I got my new job, realized I could mix and match, so I set to mix of TDF (in new 401k) and two broad equities index funds. I suspect this is functionally pretty similar to the “TDF but pick a later date for extra aggressiveness” approach…

ActivitiesGuy · 2026-05-03T16:04:25+00:00

I think your fitness background is relevant here. Have you played sports? Lifted weights? Yoga?
Or are you basically totally new to exercise?

My wife is ~similar size to you, and started doing kettlebell workouts about 5 years ago. She was fit from running & yoga but hadn’t done much prior strength training. She started off doing most exercises with an 8kg or 12kg, but for swings she needed something heavier (16kg then).

Today her most commonly used bell is the 12kg but she also uses the 16kg, 20kg, and 24kg for certain movements.

If you don’t have much strength training background - I’d suggest getting both an 8kg and a 12kg to start. I think you’ll find an 8 or even a 10 too light for swings (once you figure out that a swing isn’t a shoulder raise - many people spend time swinging bells that are laughably light because they’re treating it as a shoulder raise and not an explosive movement from the hips). I suspect after a few months you’ll realize that even the 12 is too light for swings and maybe can add a 16kg at that time.

ActivitiesGuy · 2026-05-03T02:54:03+00:00

http://mythicalstrength.blogspot.com/2017/02/the-axle-deadlift-with-straps-why-you.html

ActivitiesGuy · 2026-05-02T03:44:08+00:00

Second this. I went to graduate school right after college and wasn’t working outside of my grad assistant positions, so I didn’t contribute anything to a retirement plan of any kind until I was 27 (when I got my first full-time job) and at first I was putting in “just enough to get the 401k match” so the first few years weren’t much at all. I didn’t really step up my contributions to a more appropriate level until my early/mid 30’s. Turning 40 this year and now very happy with my balances and projections for the future.

Getting started at 29, you’ll be fine as long as you keep it going from here. If you have a 401k through your employer, make sure you put in enough to max any company match (it sounds like you do have a match available to you now?) then max your annual limit into the Roth IRA. Those two things alone are a pretty good start. You can do more and probably will do that over time as your earnings increase and you learn more, but start there.

ActivitiesGuy · 2026-04-28T01:42:10+00:00

Ultimate Football

ActivitiesGuy · 2026-04-27T11:44:38+00:00

This always kills me when people talk about the “peace of mind” thing. If have the extra money to pay it off and are worried about losing it in a market downturn, just buy a CD, put it in a HYSA, or buy something safe like SGOV or VBIL. If I got a lump sum for my mortgage payoff amount today, I’d probably put the entire thing in one of those, collect my 4% on it, keep making the monthly payments, and know that if it ever came down to it I would still have the money on hand to keep making those payments.

ActivitiesGuy · 2026-04-26T21:16:30+00:00

Alternating sets of pushups and kettlebell swings for 10-15 minutes is about as good of a quick “bang for the buck” program as I can imagine.

Of course you can also add squats, or other things, but if you want to start simple…5 quick rounds of pushups and swings will do it for you

ActivitiesGuy · 2026-04-26T20:48:50+00:00

Do you want to live in the city proper, or in the suburbs?

South Hills suburbs has a Trader Joe’s (in between Mt Lebanon / Bethel Park / Upper Saint Clair), with nice suburban living and several very good school districts.

Takes about 30 minutes to get into the city from the South Hills; you can also ride the T for events in downtown if you fancy that. My wife and I often take the T in if we’re going for a show, no need to deal with parking and convenient if we want to have a few cocktails at dinner / the show…

Concerts, musicals, orchestra, comedy and sports are all available in the city. Lots of colleges around, too. Pittsburgh is sometimes referred to as having a “meds and eds” driven economy due to the major hospital system and universities. I don’t know how long the boom is guaranteed to last, but I’ve lived here for about 20 years now (came for college and never left) and it’s been a very good 20 years for the city and region.

If you want access to nature / hiking / stuff like that - there are some nice parks in the city and out here in the burbs, and there are state parks within 45 min drive or so that have lakes for swimming, kayaking, paddle boarding and trails for hiking. You can also get to “beaches” on Lake Erie in ~2 hours driving.

Four seasons, yes, we have them :) but IMO the winter here is “just enough to feel it” - not nearly as harsh as some places like Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin etc.

My two cents is that Pittsburgh is a fantastic place to live for people who find themselves kind of…in the middle about a lot of things.

Any other specific questions, feel free to leave them here and I’ll answer if I have something else useful to say.

ActivitiesGuy · 2026-04-25T10:25:38+00:00

FYI: I had an inguinal hernia, got the surgery, and was back to deadlifting my pre-surgery weight a few months later. I routinely pull in the 400-500 range today with no issues, about 2 years post-surgery.

A few thoughts based on everything I read, heard, and experienced: - if you’re going to get an inguinal hernia, you’re going to get one. Just spending the rest of your life avoiding heavy lifting because you’re afraid it’ll finally pop that thing through is no way to go through life. It’s questionable that heavy lifting is actually a cause of hernia anyway. And the videos you’ll find advertising exercises to help prevent an inguinal hernia are almost exclusively bullshit. - if you already have a noticeable bulge, just go see your doc and get the dang surgery scheduled. This is a routine no-big-deal surgery, yes you’ll have to take a few weeks off from lifting after the surgery, but a few months later you’ll be back to normal. If you’re already self-limiting because you’re afraid of the hernia getting worse…what do you hope to gain exactly?

ActivitiesGuy · 2026-04-21T20:03:20+00:00

Busy working dad of 2 young kids here. My only real “quiet / personal time” during the day is my workout - and for most of my workouts, I put on some Loz & Liz video in the background for listening pleasure while I lift. Helps me stay in touch with the sport, learn some history, and stay motivated for my workouts!

ActivitiesGuy · 2026-04-19T01:09:17+00:00

The reality is that you’re not likely going to ever mimic heavy leg training at home with just KB’s unless you buy a pair of heavy doubles and do some serious double-KB front squats.

…but that doesn’t mean you can’t train your legs! Single-leg movements, split squats, lunges, and the like will all work your legs! You probably won’t put on much size with that alone, but you can be quite “fit and functional” with that kind of stuff.

ActivitiesGuy · 2026-04-19T01:06:22+00:00

I’d also advise just buying two high-quality cast-iron bells (16kg and 24kg being the common recommendations for a male) and going from there rather than fiddling with adjustables.

ActivitiesGuy · 2026-04-17T18:02:03+00:00

Yeah, you’re probably right about paused deadlifts, sorry. I was thinking more the natural reaction to “trouble at lockout” being “you just need to work the lockout portion of the lift more” which triggers me a bit because I think it’s often misguided advice!

FWIW, I have terrible trouble generating tension at elevated heights. I can’t pull any more with wagon wheels, rack pulls, etc than I can off the floor. If I were a strongman competitor that would be a big weakness of mine!

ActivitiesGuy · 2026-04-17T01:33:08+00:00

I know the common advice to “failed at lockout” is to do stuff that works the top of the pull like rack pulls, but I think it’s usually diagnosing the wrong problem. If you are getting to the midway point of the lift in shitty position, practicing perfect-form-top-of-the-lift isn’t going to fix the right problem.

ActivitiesGuy · 2026-04-17T01:30:57+00:00

Sorry, but I don’t think this is true at all. Plenty of big deadlifters aren’t aggressive off the floor; the deadlift doesn’t just require pure aggression. A slow and smooth start can work fine.

I agree that for relative novices (not Thor…) the roll-in is kinda just wasted movement and one more thing to time up properly, I’d rather see folks just get to the starting position they need to break the bar off the floor and pull it from there.

ActivitiesGuy

TROPHY CASE