You say you are building long term generational wealth.
You tell your friends, your wife, your accountant, yourself. That is the phrase. Long term generational wealth.
Then at the end of every month you write a tuition check with after tax money, and you have been doing it for years, and the account that would let you stop doing that is still not open.
Not because you cannot open it. Not because it is complicated. Not because your state does not have one. You just have not done it. And every year that you do not do it, the clock that measures the account’s age never starts, the compounding you keep talking about never happens, and you keep writing the check at full price.
This is the pattern I see.
Business owners love to talk about the long game while treating their kids’ money like it is an emergency problem they will handle whenever they get a free afternoon.
They will spend three hours optimizing a credit card points strategy. They will spend twelve hours a week on a business that nets them forty grand a year.
But the twenty minutes it takes to open a 529 and start the fifteen year Roth transfer clock is somehow always scheduled for next quarter.
Here is the part that is harder to say out loud. The reason you have not opened the account is not a time problem. It is a belief problem. You do not actually believe it matters. You think the real money will come from the business. You think you will make it up later when things calm down. You think you have plenty of runway because your kid is only six.
Your kid is six once. The compounding clock does not care about your business goals. The tax code does not extend its deadlines because Q3 was rough.
The money your kid has at eighteen is a function of what you did when they were five, six, seven, and eight. And right now, you are doing nothing.
And you keep telling yourself the same damn story that you are building it for them. If you were building it for them, the account would already be open. The money would already be in it. The plan would already exist. What you are actually building is a justification for why you have not done the thing yet.
This is the shit I see across hundreds of businesses. Parents with real income, real businesses, and real intention, paying full price for everything the tax code wanted them to discount, and then telling themselves they are playing the long game.
You are not playing the long game. You are waiting. Those are two different things.
So ask yourself the real question. If the account is this easy to open, and the tax treatment is this clear, and the clock starts the moment you do it, why is it still not open? It is not a money problem. It is not an information problem. So what is it?
That is the question. I do not have a cute answer for you.