Argh! Something is terribly wrong. Our 2016 AGI was less than $50k. We filed 1040, but one of us is a dislocated worker. We should qualify for the Simplified Means Test, but the SAR is reporting our EFC in excess of $115000!
The tool allowed me to skip the net worth questions, but I wonder if by doing so, does it actually zero out these values, or pick them up from the previous year - when we didn’t qualify for the SMT.
OR - this year’s DRT is getting the wrong info. But there is no way to check that, since the tool doe not show the numbers it transferred any more.
Does anyone know about valuing a Florida Prepaid College Plan for the FAFSA. Is it the refundable amount (original investment) or do we have to calculate the number of credit hours by the 2017 rate? Thanks.
It looks like your EFC is about 100x what it should be($115k rather than $1150?), so if you entered income as 50,000 00, it would be way too much income. Or if the income was entered in the student section.
If you used the DRT, it could still be wrong but you can’t tell.
All you can do is go through every line, and then call FAFSA to see what the problem is.
@liveonboca For Ohio I logged the 529 website and just printed out its current value.
Oh, and remember to include the value for ALL tuition plans under parents’ assets, including those of children you are not filing the FAFSA for. I didn’t realize that at first.
There is no cents field. If by the above words you mean that you entered two zeros for cents to represent whole dollars, you did it wrong.
Let’s say that the actual income figure on a W-2 for parent 1 is $53,415,38. The proper amount to enter on FAFSA is 53,415. Not 53,415.00 or 5341500. Round to the nearest whole dollar and do not enter any digits for cents.
Ideally your parent 1 and parent 2 earned income listed on FAFSA should add up to your 2016 AGI minus any other taxable income reported on the tax return .i.e. interest
For a prepaid tuition plan, the amount to report on FAFSA is the refund value. From the FAFSA instructions:
Investments also include qualified educational benefits or education savings accounts (e.g., Coverdell savings accounts, 529 college savings plans and the refund value of 529 prepaid tuition plans). For a student who does not report parental information, the accounts owned by the student (and/or the student’s spouse) are reported as student investments in question 42. For a student who must report parental information, the accounts are reported as parental investments in question 91, including all accounts owned by the student and all accounts owned by the parents for any member of the household.
“2. You can only add 10 colleges at a time to the FAFSA. Since my kid is applying to about 15, this worried me, until I did a bit more research. The recommendations I found suggest adding your in-state schools first, then add those with the earliest financial aid deadline. Later, after you recieve the Student Aid Report, you can delete those first 10 and add more.”
Can someone please explain this further? DS will be applying to more than 10 schools, as well. If we list the first 10 and submit, how do we then go back and delete those and add the others? And if we do that, will the first 10 schools still get the FAFSA data they need?
“Any chance you did a retirement rollover in 2016?”
I have been in touch with FAFSA support, and this is indeed the issue. It is actually a painful issue, as I’ll describe.
I did have a rollover from my former employer’s 401(k) to a rollover IRA. On my 1040, it was correctly reported on line 16a, and since it was a rollover, line 16b showed a value of 0.
I seem to have run afoul of a quirk of the FAFSA/DRT. When you run DRT, it populates FAFSA line 94f (Parents’ Untaxed Portions of Pensions) with the value from 1040 line 16a. Not 16b.
Then … and this is key … you are apparently prompted with a checkbox on FAFSA below line 94f to indicate if this was a rollover. Clearly, my daughter and I missed that.
But worst of all - you CANNOT correct this by going through a Make Corrections flow on the FAFSA website!! Once submitted, that rollover checkbox never reappears.
So the next step for us is to wait until the school shows they have received the FAFSA, and then visit the OFA and request them to correct it. This probably means letters, supporting docs, etc.
All of this could have been avoided by ticking a checkbox. Ironic, huh!
So my advice - double and triple check every line on your FAFSA before submitting. Not everything can be corrected on the website.
The more than 10 thing is easy. You put the first ten (we did it alphabetically), and submit. Then when it’s processed, usually a couple of days later, you take off the first ten and put the next however many and submit. All the schools get it. @klbmom18@tandrsmom
What is even more insidious is that now you don’t see DRT values. Only the words “Transferred from IRS.” So you can tell which values are non-zero that you need to pay attention to!
