Students for whom financial aid is a priority will in many cases be better served by focusing on schools that use the FAFSA and not the CSS Profile. Likewise, a student whose first choice school uses the Profile and is out of reach financially would be well-served in the financial aid appeals process to find a competitive school that uses…
Browsing Category
Divorce
Recently I was a guest on the Hack Your Wealth podcast where we discussed all things financial aid. You can listen to the podcast here.
The FAFSA asks about income numerous ways: it collects your tax return data through the IRS Data Retrieval Tool and then poses a number of additional questions about income. So let’s look at those. First, the IRS DRT pulls your 2019 tax data including adjusted gross income and actual taxes paid. However, that leaves some items out and the FAFSA…
Students whose parents are divorced have some planning opportunities if the exes are willing to cooperate. The first step is of course to understand the planning areas. And the first step of that first step is to understand a key definition: “custodial parent.” Custodial parent is used in two primary places for college purposes, and in ways that are completely…
I write a lot about the FAFSA, but there’s a second financial aid form that’s also important: the CSS Profile. While all schools use the FAFSA to allocate federal funds such as Direct Student Loans, a subset of schools– primarily private schools– use the CSS Profile in their financial aid calculations. There are a few key differences between the two…