My DM sadly passed away last year. Her estate is split between her 2 children and 4 grandchildren in various shares. My 2 DC have inherited c£65k each which is intended to help with university costs or setting themselves up with a house deposit. The advice online seems to be to invest in stocks and shares ISAs if you'll be leaving it for more than 5 years, which is the case for the younger grandchildren but my oldest is 15 and planning to go to uni at 18. Is this still the best option for her? Even if it is the tax free allowance is £9k per year so presumably most of it would have to go into a different sort of account.
I'm a bit clueless as to when the bills will fall for uni. Would she be better off investing her money and taking a loan for the fees, or paying the fees upfront?
I think uni costs will use up pretty much all of her money but it would be good to be able to help her with a house deposit as well which I can start to save for if I use my share of the inheritance to pay down our mortgage.
We'd obviously want to do the same for our youngest if but there's 4 years between them so her money will have more chance to grow so will need to work out what's fair. In any case by the time our youngest is ready to leave home we could downsize or relocate to release more funds. I guess there's our own old age to think about but we both have public sector pensions which I'm hoping would be enough to live off once the mortgage is paid off. We are currently 20 yearsish away from retirement.