Independent and higher education offers the likelihood of a more prosperous future for your children.

A bill per term, per child, can vary from £1,000 - £4,000 (or more), depending on where you send them – therefore the earlier you start, the less you will pay and it is worth remembering, any investment, however small, is better than none at all!.

School fees planning and planning for the cost of university education needs to be initiated many years in advance. The primary objective is to build up a capital sum to meet the cost of school fees in respect of primary and secondary education, and then the fees and maintenance costs for university education.

The National Union of Students calculate that the combined cost of living is anywhere from £5,000 - £8,000 a year. This cost is likely to rise when you take inflation into account. The Education White Paper 2003 has detailed plans to abolish existing tuition fees in 2006 and replace them with annual fees of up to £3,000, repayable once the student has graduated and is earning above £15,000 a year. Theoretically this should take the emphasis off parents paying but many believe that parents will continue to subsidise their children’s university education. Those parents with specific investment plans for education fees should review their existing investments in the light of the proposed increases.

There are a number of different types of savings plans available on the market to help you meet the fees, ranging from the relative safety of the building society account to buying stock in emerging markets, with *Unit Trusts, Investment Trusts, OEIC’s, With-Profits Endowment plans and Fixed-interest options in between.
If you haven’t started saving for education early enough and you are suddenly confronted with funding a child’s independent or university education, your IFA can help you look into special loans, which involve an extra mortgage on your home.

While no IFA can guarantee that a plan will completely meet all the expenses, especially when stock market performance can go down as well as up, we can offer advice on how to make the money you have work better for you.

*The above investment products should be regarded as medium to long-term investments and each carries a degree of risk. It is important to ensure that you keep enough capital readily available in a bank or building society account to cover short-term requirements.

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