Welcome to the Money Tree Investing Podcast.

Stock market, wealth, personal finance, value stocks, invest in your life.

Hello, Smart Money Tree Podcast listeners. Welcome to this week's show. My name is Kurt Chisholm. I'll be your host.

So today, I'm joined with Patricia Roberts. How you know today, Patricia?

Doing fine. Thank you.

Great. Well, glad to have you in the show. This is a good topic. There's a lot going on

the news about college recently, so wanted to bring on Patricia to talk about that.

Patricia, maybe you tell us a little bit about your background.

I have spent the last two decades, actually more than the last two decades, helping parents and others learn

about simple steps they can take to prepare for the high cost of higher education so that the

children they love can pursue those academic and career dreams without the crushing weight

of student loan debt. I began my focus on these plans first as an attorney at Citigroup in the late

1990s, helping to bid on some of these state plans with the various states that were offering them at

the time, and then helping to create those disclosure documents and everything that goes along with

running a 529 plan. I subsequently went to

Merrill Lynch and to Alliance Bernstein investments to work on the business side of these 529 plans.

Since then, I helped build a nonprofit program here in New York City, whereby over 200,000 public

school kindergartners now have seed money for college.

And I currently work for a firm called Gift of College where we're bringing 529 education

and student loan repayment benefits to the workplace.

And I must say, Kurt, in my favorite role of all, I'm the mom of a recent debt-free grad, who actually

wrote the forward to my book Route 529, which was my pandemic project. And maybe we'll talk a little

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