So I’m currently 17 years old, and I was recently accepted into a university early decision. I looked onto my college’s website, and I found out that my tuition will be about $80k a year (including housing + meals), and I assume my family will spend money to bring me home when school is out. I had several conversations with my mother about how exactly I will pay for school, and she said that the majority of my tuition will be payed through a trust fund that my father left me before he passed away. For most of my life, I chose not to ask my mother about the trust because I always heard her complain about how the long court battle she had trying to uphold the clause of her divorce agreement saying that if either she or my dad were to pass away before I was 18, they would leave all their money to me, but my father instead tried to leave some money to his friends and establish his lawyer friend as my trustee. Apparently, the fight got pretty nasty, and even though my mother was named a trustee by a judge later on, my dad’s lawyer friend used money from my trust fund to pay for his defense in the lawsuit. My mom also objected to paying someone to manage my stocks and bonds while we have family who are very successful hedge fund workers. After sitting down with my mom, I discovered that my trust fund is currently worth about $1.4 million in various stocks and bonds. The fund was set up about 3-4 years ago at around $1.1 million, and it has paid my $40-45k tuition at private school since then, and I guess it makes sense that its still gaining money if the annual return for this year was about 5.3% or $72k. I did see that the fund was worth about $1.8 million a year ago, but my hedge fund friend explained that some stocks have gone down in the past year, and they will for a bit in the future. The fund, however, is still where it was 2 years ago, and that’s after my mom took out $150-$200k to pay for expenses. My real question is what should I expect the next “changes” to my trust to look like, because even though my mother told me it will dissolve and ownership will be mine at around age 23, the trust was set up entirely for EDUCATION. Based on the way my mom talked about it, she didn’t expect me to have much of anything left by the time I finish college (and possibly grad school) since my trust has fluctuated a bit. I still thought that if I can generate $72k a year from the trust, and combine it with the $30-40k from my Mom’s 529, I wouldn’t see much of a change compared to now, and I could have $1 million by the time I’m 23. I just want to know how I can make the best investment in my education while preparing for my future, and having some sort of an estimate would be nice.