<p>I have told my parents that they need to file taxes as soon as they can so my sister and i can do FAFSA and get as much money as possible.</p>
<p>All they do is just say they are doing it as fast as they can, but i know it wont be turned in until the deadline. Is there anything i can do?</p>
<p>Fill out the FASFA with estimates (2007 income, end of year pay stubs for 2008 etc) and make corrections when they do their taxes. Most people are waiting for their w-2's and 1099's at this point and haven't completed their taxes yet.</p>
<p>Some people don't get W-2s until very late. You can estimate your FAFSA with your parents' most recent paystubs.</p>
<p>you don't necessarily need to wait for your parents to finish their taxes. You could estimate off of a previous years taxes or you could even gather their last paystub or salary information of the year. What I do is ask my mother for all of her information and actually just figure her rough taxes on turbotax so I get an estimate of them for this year. Its not exact because I'm not using the w2 form etc. . but I do get good values to put into the fafsa. then, once she actually files, I will just fill out a fafsa correction. Of course, if your parents have tons of hidden income or complex stuff in their taxes, then it might be better to just make them hurry up. ha good luck.</p>
<p>As long as you make the deadline, at least with estimates, you will be fine. The early bird DOES NOT get the worm, in this case. FAFSA is not a granting organization; it communicates info to your schools. Your schools are the ones that will use the info from FAFSA to determine your money, and they probably don't go first-come-first-served either. I think very few do that.</p>
<p>Did you send in your 2007 taxes and use them as estimates? For all my schools, we did the estimates, and for my top choice, EDII school which requires 2008 taxes, we sent in the 2007 ones so they could do their own estimates. The Financial Aid office was actually very happy with this because a lot of people just don't bother sending in any sort of taxes until the ones for the last fiscal year are done.
The only school I know of that uses the "first come, first served" basis is Hamilton, who rewards ED students first, then EDII, then reg decision. But that's probably because the estimated financial aid comes with the letter..</p>