<prompt> Human: I am looking for some advice. My wife and I have a newborn due in may and I have started to look into different ways we can deal with money the baby receives as gifts. We seem to disagree to an extent on how we deal with it and what it should be used for.Personally I would like to take whatever money the baby receives and put it into a 529 to help pay for college down the road. My wife would like to put it into some type of savings account similar to what her parents did for her so that the baby will have that money available to them down the road separate from whatever is saved for college. If we do this, we would either set up a trust account or invest it somehow and gift it to them when they are old enough to manage it themselves. I dont like the idea of just leaving cash to sit there losing money to inflation.My primary concern is our ability to save enough for college and plan for our own retirement at the same time. After the baby is born my wife is planning to take another job in order to spend more time with the baby. This will result in a 20kyear pay cut, and then the added expenses of having a child on top of that. The net result is that it will make it difficult to put any sizable amount of money into a 529 on a regular basis.I understand where she is coming from, and I would love to do both, but Im not sure we can. Would the gift of college serve them better through life. Or do we risk the chance of not being able to afford to pay for their college, but give them a lump of cash at 18.Any advice you can offer would be very much appreciated.And of course if its a girl there is the wedding someday. Someone needs to create a tax advantaged account to save for those at some point :p  <response>: Remember: Your child can take out loans to go to school. You cant take out loans to retire. 