Zero input in Children Expense Page, but still has Net Withdrawals from Cash Account for 529 Plan (PRC2022.2.11) ?

@wugang_rmd I'm not sure I'm following you. A few questions to help clarify:

Are you saying that the Children Expense page is all blanks (i.e., no children listed)? If not, what do you mean by "zero input"?

Where is it that you're seeing net withdrawals from the cash account for the 529 plan? Do you have a 529 plan balance but no children, or what?

Thanks,

Stuart

@smatthews51 I did not enter any data regarding the 529 plan (zero initial balance, all blanks in the Children Expense page. But I see net withdrawals from Cash Account in the far right column "Header title - 529 Plan" in the Tabular Withdrawl Projections page. It starts from age 71 untill the end of the forecast.

Thanks,

Gary

I wonder if Gary @wugang_rmd is running into the same problem I ran into yesterday, where I noticed a mysterious expense going into the 529. Looking at the manual revealed:

How Do You Intend to Fund Each Education? Pralana allows you to model the funding of college educations in one of three ways:...

2. 529 Plan, in which case Pralana will consider your initial 529 Plan balance as specified on the Initial Balances page and then calculate your annual contributions to the plan to exactly cover the specified costs. Unless the initial balance of the 529 Plan is sufficiently high, Pralana will start your contributions in the Starting Year and continuing until all children whose college education are being funded with this method are due to graduate. Pralana assumes that 100% of that child’s college costs are qualified costs and withdrawals from the 529 Plan account are used to cover all those costs. Your contributions to a 529 Plan are treated as expenses in the year they are paid. The interest earned on the account is not included in your taxable income. [my emphasis]

The automatic funding ("expense") of the 529s in this manner doesn't fit my own situation, so I ending up turning off the 529 option.

@wugang_rmd Without having the benefit of a screenshot, I'm having to do some guessing here. But with that said, I brought up a copy of PRC2022.2.1 and looked at the Tab Projections > Withdrawals page and see that there is indeed a column on the far right entitled "Net Withdrawals from Cash Account" there. But that falls under a major heading called "Unscheduled Withdrawals" and I see nothing related 529 Plan. In your copy, there may very well be a major column header above the Net Withdrawals from Cash Account column that's called 529 Plan; however, if that's the case, that column header is user-controlled and may or may not have anything to do with the subordinate column headers. So, please post or email me (mail@pralanaconsulting.com) a screenshot of your page so I can know for sure what's going on.

Thanks,

Stuart

@smatthews51 I didn't realize column header is user-controlled. You are right it may left from another copy of spreadsheet I was working on.