Cal Grant/FAFSA -just a heads up!

I just wanted to shout out to other California families to check your Cal Grant accounts. If you qualify, it’s worth almost $50K for UCs/privates and over $20K for CSUs. If you haven’t set up your Cal Grant account, do it now and check it every couple of weeks or at least sometime before the deadline in case you have to make corrections or something is missing. The deadline is March 2nd and if something goes wrong, there really is no appeal process.

I just realized that I made a mistake! This is my 5th year of financial aid applications and I thought I had it down by now. FAFSA opened Oct 1 and we submitted DD’s around that time for early schools and some California schools making sure to have a California school be in one of the first three slots for Cal Grant. When she set up her Cal Grant account, everything looked great and there was a green check mark next to FAFSA dated early Oct… We are still waiting for her school to do the GPA verification but we have plenty of time for that.

I checked her Cal Grant account today just wondering if her school had uploaded the GPA because the person at her school who does it mentioned that she was having a lot of trouble. No GPA yet but it now her Cal Grant account says “school not found”-yikes! They won’t be able to give her an award without a school listed. I can’t use the Cal Grant menu to change schools if there is no award and there won’t be an award if I don’t have a California school listed.

The mistake I made was removing California schools to add more schools in January. Cal Grant said her FAFSA was processed with the big green check mark so I thought it was safe after 3 months to make changes to her FAFSA because it said complete. I was wrong, rookie mistake! Even though Cal Grant has the original date of October listed on her account, they no longer have her California schools because they update each time a new FAFSA is done and they don’t save your original schools list. To correct the error, I simply had to go back to FAFSA to do a correction adding a California school back on the list. It takes at least a week for Calgrant to process so you don’t want to find this out the last week of February.

I hope this helps someone else!