A couple of weeks ago, Virginia529 started giving away $25 to anyone opening a new account. The offer expires this Friday, April 30th, or whenever enough people have signed up for it. My wife and I created new accounts for each of our six children, as well as for each other, netting $350 in free money. Here’s the TL;DR:

• You must be 18 years old (if I can get my adult daughter to take advantage of it, the family savings would be $525)
• You don’t have to be a Virginia resident
• You can’t open one for yourself (I tried!)
• The beneficiary can be an adult
• You can use the SAVE25APRIL2022 gift code once per account owner/beneficiary combo
• There’s no stipulations around keeping the money in the account for a certain period, beyond the regular program rules (i.e. you can roll it out, change beneficiaries, etc).
• Opening a new account should be simple, unless you already have invested in each of the 25 different investment options. At Virginia529, each investment option is a separate account.

It’s free money, no strings attached. As a Virginia resident, I suspect that this counts as a contribution, meaning I can deduct an additional $350 from my state taxes for 2022, netting an additional $20 in tax savings.

In theory, my five siblings and their spouses, my four in-laws and their spouses, and all the other adults in our extended family could do this for each other, netting a huge amount of free money. But something tells me that they won’t be super excited to share their kids SSNs with me to take advantage of the offer 🙂