Reply to S/o don't financial aid offices penalize families who are capable of saving but who choose not to?

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Reply to "S/o don't financial aid offices penalize families who are capable of saving but who choose not to?"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]And it's now prior, prior year income and many of the private schools also ask about prior year and current year income and assets, so sure you could decide to temporarily "fake" a lower income, but you would then have to do that for 6 years per child.  At that point the lower income would likely become "real."  And people overestimate what that will really save you maybe 5-10k yr at best.  Not saving when you have a high income rarely pays off--maybe if you have 2-3 kids in college at schools that cost 80k and no merit aid.

We have a HHI of 100k and about an EFC of around 34k.  So we don't qualify for need-based aid outside of loans for in-state publics, but we do qualify for need-based aid at private schools that meet full need. IME the merit aid packages beat out the need packages at these anyways--since the need ones expect quite a bit of loans.

Quite honestly, the 34k is exactly what I feel capable of paying--it's definitely a stretch and requires sacrifices but not to the point where I would say no to my kid's first choice college on the basis of the finances--so I think financial aid offices are good at their job.

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Just curious what your [b]net income[/b] is each year. How much do you actually bring home yearly?[/quote]

With 2 kids, after taxes and other contributions our net income is just under 75k/yr.    We have saved for both kids' college regularly since they were born so we have just about 100k in 529 plans with the eldest starting this year (our kids don't overlap in years in college which would give us a big benefit in FA).  I believe our EFC would have been closer to 30k without the savings, but glad we have it.  We generally keep to a 4500-5000 mo budget, so that gives us around 20k to cash flow to college, and we draw down the remainder from savings, around 15k. So Child 1 will use up about 60k of the savings, which seems proportionate to age.  DC is going to a tuition freeze school.[/quote]

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