<p>My daughter lives in an apartment year round and supports herself on the non school months. During school she uses her 529 monies to pay for tuition/room/board. We were thinking of not claiming her on our taxes this year becuase we don't need her deduction and she does. BUT, then can we go ahead and put down that we have 2 in the household attending college for FAFSA purposes (we have another in in school we will claim) Not sure if we would be doing something wrong. So we wouldn;t claim her as a tax dependent, but we would claim her on FAFSA as if she is our dependent.</p>
<p>FAFSA uses a support test, not actual residency, to determine who is in the household. If you will provide more than 50% of her support during the period in question (7/1/12-6/30/13) then she can be included in your household for FAFSA. It doesn’t matter that you don’t claim her as a dependent for tax purposes.</p>
<p>I guess that is what my question is. We don’t support her at all except for what she draws off of her 529 for tuition, room and board. Other than that she works to support herself, her spending, her rent and expenses on the non school months. I am thinking that I can justify it by thinking that FAFSA counts the 529 as a parent asset and since she is drawing off of that during the school year, we are supporting her??</p>
<p>What a friend of mine did was claim her son on taxes and then paid him what he would have gotten had he claimed himself. These are not accurate numbers, but for example… you get $2000 for claiming her and she gets $200 for claiming herself… You get $1800 for yourself (or you can give to her if you want), but yeah, if she wouldn’t get much tax refund, it’s better to keep her on as your dependent.</p>
<p>Even if she takes her own deduction, not only can you claim 2 in college … but you actually should. Even if a student under the age of 24 makes a million dollars (don’t laugh - my D’s high school classmate had his own company that grossed more than a million annually), she is still a dependent student for financial aid purposes. It’s irrelevant who claims the student, and it’s irrelevant how much the student earns, and it’s irrelevant that that student hasn’t been home in 3 years … she is still dependent for federal financial aid purposes.</p>
<p>That is what I thought, but I wanted to run it by the experts here!! wink wink</p>
<p>crazymomster, since my husband has been on UC and I work part time, we have ridiculous amount of deductions, we really don’t need her this particular year!</p>