When I turn 18, 16k in a gift trust matures and is placed under my name. This is now 3 days away, October 17th, and I have almost no idea what I want to do with it. I get that its a personal choice, but I still have some questions for those of you who have been out in the real world.

I don't have any immediate purchases that I have to make, but at some point I'm going to need to buy a car, house, food. Given this I will probably want to bring the investment out of its current fairly high risk fund and into something a bit more predictable. Currently it's in American Century's All Cap Growth Fund. My parents seem to believe that it makes sense to get it out of there as fast as possible and into something with less risk. Its apparently dropped significantly in value recently. To my way of thinking thats the last time you want to get out of an investment, its likely to go back up again. Am I wrong?

Additionally I'm thinking about putting some of this money directly into a retirement account. Am I absolutely crazy? I have barely any income right now, but also almost no expenses (living at home and college is free minus my books). I'm in a degree program that ought to land me with OK job prospects (Computer Science) and as I already mentioned I don't have to go into debt for my education.

On a similar note I'm having a hard time working out how I should size my emergency fund. A month of my income isn't much certainly not enough to live off of. Does anyone know or can give me some help calculating approximately how much it would cost to live a month in northeast Ohio? Should I even be planning for that as a dependant with almost no chance of living on my own for the next two years?

As an added complication I'm trying to convince my parents not to move an additional 11k into my name to match the value of the gift trust my older brother got (they paid more into it). To me there just isn't a reason to and we've been putting off car purchases. With that the whole question of taxes come into play. Would it count as taxable income? Probably.

I get that this is similar to some of the FAQ questions and answers. I have read most of them, but it doesn't really fully apply to my situation.

Thanks to any who got this far. The TD;RD is that I will in 3 days find my self with 16k possibly 27k in a gift trust that I don't know what to do with.