As we wrote in “How To Distribute from A College America 529 Plan to a College“:

Distributions payable to the school can be requested in one of two ways. You can either call American Funds directly to request the distribution or you can use their online portal to place the necessary trades and request the distribution. Calling them on the phone is almost always easier for clients.

If you are simply looking for how to distribute funds from your College America 529 plan, navigate to that article and follow the instructions for making the distribution over the phone.

If you are curious about how the online process works, this article is for you.

Log In and Locate Relevant Account

The first step is to log in to your College America account at https://www.capitalgroup.com/individual/accounts/login.htm.

On the page that loads, you will see a list of all the 529 plans where you are the account owner. Locate the appropriate account and click “Sell” in the purple menu.

There is a Selling FAQ which includes minimum fund balances.

Provide Sell Orders

At this point, you will be asked how much should be sold from each fund’s balance. Since fund prices are fluctuating every day, it can be difficult to calculate a good amount to sell from each fund.

If you have sufficient Money Market to meet the withdrawal, you can simply request sells from this source to meet your withdrawal needs.

If there is insufficient Money Market, strive to request a sell of less than 90% of each fund in order to leave room for market price fluctuations and ensure that you will have sufficient funds for the withdrawal.

Pick Payment Method Recipient

For my own accounts this method was unavailable and I received the following error message:

This was caused by the address for my beneficiary having been entered as “Charlottesville” which is too many characters. As a result, the city they have on file was either truncated or abbreviated. Since many of our clients also live in Charlottesville, I assume that many of our clients will have this problem as well. Calling American Funds solved the problem, but if you are calling American Funds anyway, you can simply request the withdrawal over the phone.

After the problem was resolved, I was able to choose my preferred payment method from the list of options. The three options listed for me were:

1. Depositing the funds into my FundsLinked external account.
   Selecting this method allows for the recipient to be either the account owner or the beneficiary. Whichever you select, the distribution will be reported under the recipient’s tax id.
2. Mailing a check to the account owner’s home address.
   Selecting this method online only allows for the recipient to be the account owner. To have checks sent which are made out to the beneficiary you must call American funds. They do not have a method of doing this online.
3. Mailing a check to a college or university.
   You will provide all the relevant information.
   

Pick Payment Method and Recipient

The next step it to identify the Recipient. Options vary based on your selection for payment method but include the Owner, Beneficiary, or filling out the information for a College or University.

For College or University, you begin by typing the name of the college or university in the box and watching as schools begin to populate in the space below the box. When you are sure you have found the correct school, select it by clicking on it. If you don’t find the appropriate school, you will need to call American Funds to determine if the school you are trying to select is a qualifying institution.

Next, you will be asked to fill out information about how to send a payment to the selected school.

In order to find the school’s billing address, do an online search for either the “Student Financial Services” or the “Cashier’s Office.” Here is an example of the Student Financial Services and the Cashier’s Office for the University of Virginia.

In order to determine the beneficiary’s student id, ask the beneficiary for that information. It is often on the bill which includes the amount you are trying to pay.

There is no postage cost for “USPS Regular Mail.” For an additional charge you can have “USPS Priority Mail,” and for an even greater charge you can have “USPS Expedited Delivery.” But since delivery fees will be taken out of your total redemption, we don’t suggest using anything other than “USPS Regular Mail.”

Confirmation Screens

Next, you will be asked to confirm the United State Postal Service’s adjustment of the school’s mailing address.

And finally, you will be presented with a summary of your sell request.

Along with some warnings from American Funds:

Press “Next” to confirm sending the requested amount to the school.

If you are a client of our firm, we can assist you in monitoring the success of your distribution if you tell us about it. if you send us the details from your confirmation screen, we can monitor the success of your transactions.

If you are not a client of our firm, we recommend that you check back on your 529 plan in a week to verify that the transaction(s) occurred as you requested.

Photo of Stanford by Megan Russell. Image has been cropped.