Wow, paying for dental school is incredibly generous. In our pre retirement budget, we drew the "line" at grad school, but my wife and I will probably kick in most of their expenses for that as well. It will be significant but it really doesn't impact our retirement life style and as long as the schooling leads to good career possibilities, we look at it as ROI.
I consider we are so lucky to be in the position to be able to pay her tuition. Things have just worked out for us as far as our investment life.
A while back, using our SS statements, I used an inflation calculator and took our income from 1981 and found what that is in today's dollars. I put this in a spread sheet for every year until we retired. Our average income
over our married (savings) years, in today's dollars is about $72k. So we were not high earners, but good savers. We retired in the 94th percentile of the net worth of Americans. Our first year of marriage (1981) we earned
$18k and saved $6k, first time I ever saved any money was our first year of marriage.
To add to this, these last 9 years, when we had already accumulated a sustainable nest egg, the market just took off like a rocket!
We have everything we need and just aren't big spenders, so we have way more than we need, I expect the kids will get a nice inheritance, so why not give it to them now*, if it is for a great cause. We do have a trust and expect some of that tuition subtracted and the other child will get that same amount added to inheritance.
Also, I would hate to see my kid start life $275,000 in debt, after growing up with parents who never had any debt.
I have also given up trying to track the spending for my adult kids or detailed spending tracking in general. Why bother when I am no longer trying to maximize my savings to reach RE, and I've the wiggle room. Now keeping an eye on credit cards at the end of each month, tamping down on recurring expenses, and planning for lumpy expenses seems to be enough.
I just want to put kids in another spending category because I want to know my spending. In our second year of retirement, so still need to get our real yearly spending pinned down.
*There is one downside, I like to crunch and watch the numbers. Writing these big checks, I may not always see the net worth get bigger, this year net worth grew 5% after all our spending, so that's good, but in a more normal 10% stock market, my net worth would have dropped.