<p>My son has a large trust fund that was created by his grandparents. My income is high, but not so high that I can afford $65,000/year. Since my son cant touch the trust until age 25 and we most likely will not qualify for aid, what is the best way to explain this to a university and what is the best way to try to secure at least a small amount of assistance?</p>
<p>Can you cosign loans for him and then he repays the loans when he turns 25?</p>
<p>It sounds like you should be hunting merit aid which is not based on income and assets usually. Visit the financial iad forum while you are here.</p>
<p>And what about the answers to your previous post?
<a href=“Financial Aid, FAFSA and Trust Funds - Parents Forum - College Confidential Forums”>Financial Aid, FAFSA and Trust Funds - Parents Forum - College Confidential Forums;
<p>So he can’t touch it until 21 (your previous thread) or 25 (this thread)?</p>
<p>Can you ask the Grands to change the trust so he can use the money for education?</p>
<p>It depends on the school – but go ahead and apply, and make sure you specify that he can’t touch the money until 25. But be prepared to produce the trust documents that state this if asked… I would mail a letter to the FA office and ask that this information be considered as part of his financial aid situation. I did it (but with a fairly small trust), and at least one school removed it from their asset calculation.</p>
<p>Colleges are not places that provide aid to you so that you can save your trust fund until age 25. If this is the case, perhaps you can cosign a loan and get a written agreement drawn up that stipulates that when your son CAN draw on the trust, he will repay you FIRST.</p>
<p>Keep in mind that you will be dealing with a financial aid officer who makes $85K per year and is ALSO trying to provide his or her children with a college education. If by “large trust fund” you mean 60K- then you may have some traction if you approach this gently. If you are talking about 300K and up- essentially, enough to write the checks for full freight even with inflation, with some left over, I don’t think you’ll get much sympathy.</p>
<p>You can approach the grandparents with the idea of a loan? borrowing against the trust assets? ask them to modify the trust language so that your son can tap the assets ONLY for tuition and books paid directly to a university? The intent in making the trust to age 25 was presumably so that a teenager wasn’t going to raid the funds to buy a porsche.</p>
<p>Are you the primary trustee? </p>
<p>Sometimes the trust agreement designates the age and there is no changing it. An example would be a testamentary trust (created in a will, comes into existence when the person dies). That is what my kids had.</p>
<p>@blossom </p>
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<p>I’m glad that you wrote that. It makes total sense. When I wrote something very similar a few years back I got flamed! lol </p>
<p>But, it’s true. </p>
<p>I don’t think the officers salary has anything to do with the financial aid policies of the college.</p>
<p>I think what they were saying is that, in a discretionary matter like this, it might be hard to get extra sympathy. There’s probably no policy at a university that explicitly deals with, “OK, so there’s a large trust fund that could pay for college but it’s not accessible until age 25, so here’s some more aid,” It’s more likely to be grouped into all of the other weird special circumstances that can occur, circumstances the financial aid officers have to handle case-by-case using their own judgment and a general rule instead of a formulaic procedure. </p>
<p>Brownparent- of course it has nothing to do with the policy. But the question at hand is, how to position the OP’s problem so s/he gets past the gatekeeper (the financial aid officer/representative) and bucked up to a higher court where there are people who have the authority to waive the policy and/or consider this a special circumstance.</p>
<p>If the approach is, “Poor me. My kid has 500K in a trust account but can’t tap it until he’s 25. We need more need based aid and can’t take out parent plus loans because the money is in the kids name” I think you’re going to be told to go pound rocks. There are situations which get bucked up the line (sibling with special needs where the official financial aid forms don’t accurately reflect the family’s discretionary income; etc.) and situations which don’t ( warring factions in a divorce situation where there are CLEARLY enough assets to pay for college, full freight, but neither party wants to take responsibility for tapping the assets, or the party with the larger income and asset base is claiming that the intention of the divorce decree was for the party with lower income and assets to fund college). Good luck getting a financial aid office making under 100K to take pity on a family with a few million which is busy spending down their funds by fighting in divorce court.</p>
<p>It doesn’t mean that the financial aid officer will take it out on the kid- poor kid here- just that the situation doesn’t warrant an exception to the policy (families with several million in assets don’t get need based aid in a typical circumstance).</p>
<p>If you’re asking for an exception you need to put yourself in the other parties shoes.</p>
<p>@BrownParent </p>
<p>when someone has a truly difficult situation, then a sympathetic FA officer can “take it up the ladder” to perhaps get a signature on aid that wouldn’t normally be given. Or, she/he can go to the scholarship office and see if some possible merit might ease the situation.</p>
<p>An unsympathetic FA officer can just fall back on the rules and say, “sorry,” this is the best we can do. </p>
<p>A testamentary trust, which can’t be touched until the originator dies is likely different than an irrevocable trust with the student as a beneficiary. </p>
<p>When we inquired about an irrevocable trust that was being set up, we were politely told that our share, and our kid’s share needed to be included as assets as we were all beneficiaries. </p>