Reply to What money is fair game for financial aid?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]The colleges assume that relatively more of the tuition money is coming from your income rather than assets.  So, for example, if you have 100K in savings, they may say that about $10K of that should be used toward tuition.  You can play with a net price calculator for a specific college and see how they assess income vs assets.

Re: the pellionaires.   The AGI to avoid declaring assets for Pell grant is very low, like $25K.  This works for some FIRE crowd who tend to move to areas with low cost of living, but for most other people, even minimal living expenses will trigger revealing their assets.   Also, the majority of  at least somewhat competitive schools, including the publics, require CSS.  If you are considering the kind of school that looks at FAFSA only, you'll likely end up at the same place with merit aid they offer.[/quote]

As someone who has retired to a low cost area with substantial assets and a college-bound kid, I can’t imagine restructuring my life to live on less than $25k AGI.  Maybe they do figure out how to have the S Corp pay all of their expenses, but I would think the IRS would catch on at some point. We spend more than $25k a year on travel alone. If you have that much $$, it’s really not that big of a deal to set aside $300k to pay your kid’s tuition. My kid has great stats, so we’re hoping for merit aid so some of his fund can go to graduate school, but we could afford to pay out of pocket for that, if necessary.

I do feel for people who are right over the threshold for no financial aid, but not too much — we saved most of DC’s college fund when he was young and we were making far less $$. If you save early, the power of compounding will do a lot of the work for you. I do think the people who get stretched the most are those who only recently started making higher salaries, since salary counts for more than savings. [/quote]

We haven't had a high income till recently but we managed to save on a low income.  It was our priority.  We bought a crappy house, only have had a few vacations and nothing lavish and always off season when cheaper, keep our cars till they die, etc.  We made college and graduate school a priority.  [/quote]

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