There should be many ordinary people who worked lower paid position at a startup that came with some stock options and later sold the stock to pay their debt and were still eligible for financial aid. Generous colleges may even treat this as an excusable one-time event for finaid.
Not everyone who had a $50K stock profit is a fat capitalist pig.
Fat Capitalist Pig? I assume you are referring to the entrepreneur who actually STARTED that start up that employs the ordinary person working a lower paid position. Or maybe the Venture Capital fund which provided the seed money so that the ordinary person working a lower paid position could actually have- y’know, a job. Or maybe the bank who is working on providing a loan against receivables so that ordinary person working a lower paid position can actually cash his or her paycheck and not have it bounce.
All of a sudden these people who make the economy tick and provide jobs for ordinary people are fat capitalist pigs?
My guess is it was a tongue-in-cheek comment. But those are good points to remember, just the same, @blossom.
And c’mon, this can get to be a lot of pie in the sky. You suggesting some family earning 50k (and maybe less in 2008) put away 17k, to see a 3x result? It only works with all the maybes: maybe they inherited it and didn’t need it. Maybe they won a lawsuit, maybe won the lottery, and on and on. Maybe they were once rich.
Sh*t happens, sure. But first of all, for the way this was originally posed, any tax bite would be reflected. And there’s professional judgment at schools that offer decent aid.
@blossom , did not expect that I would have to explain to you of all people that I was jokingly passive-aggressive.
Of course there are a lot of maybes, but you only need one. The point was, it’s not at all outside the realm of possibility that a family that qualifies for need-based aid can have a $50k gain from sale of stock. Is this normal for the average American family? No. But it’s certainly possible.
The point is still valid. The whole FA scheme does not work well for a lot of people. When you combine state and federal taxes on capital gains you are typically in the 20% or so bracket. You have to pay the taxes by April 15th of the year you file the FAFSA, which uses the previous years information. The $50K number could have been $10K or $100K, but the effect is the same and the liability is not accounted for in the FAFSA. This is not an atypical situation for people who own small businesses, have significant assets and are re-balancing their portfolio, or liquidate assets for a variety of reasons. Even converting a 401K to a Roth IRA can drastically alter FAFSA income and hence the FA a student receives.
The problem is that income is not really income if it comes from an asset sale. It is counted twice.
In addition, pre-tax retirement contributions also fall into income, which I think is ridiculous.
@toooldforschool I linked this earlier.
https://financialaidtoolkit.ed.gov/resources/fafsa-changes-17-18-faq.pdf
2017-18 will use 2015. It will be “prior-prior.”
What point? Anyone in the 15% bracket or below will pay no federal tax on capital gains or dividends. That’s $75,300 taxable income and below for a couple, which is AGI minus deduction and exemptions. Since state taxes often piggyback off of the federal form, I have a hard time believing that many states would impose a tax on capital gains and dividends when the feds don’t (but I could be wrong; I only have a good handle on state income tax in two states). And tax liability is accounted for on FAFSA – see questions 37 (student income tax paid) and 86 (parents income tax paid).
Income that comes from the sale of an appreciated asset isn’t really income? How do you figure that? And as far as being counted twice, it’s not treated any differently than earned income from a job – that gets counted as income for FA purposes, and if it’s still on hand when FAFSA is completed, it gets counted as an asset, too.
Pre-tax retirement contributions that are voluntary are added back in as income for the year earned. You could always choose not to make the contribution and take the income to pay for current expenses or save it in a non-qualified account. Of course, then you wouldn’t get the asset protection that a qualified retirement account provides. I guess we have here an example of not getting to have your cake and eating it too.
I’m not sure of the validity of this, and I believe someone mentioned it upthread, but I have heard on CC that some schools may substitute grant aid with loans in their financial aid package in years 2-3-4. Yes, the kid could transfer, but I’ll bet more find a way to make it work. Couldn’t annual tuition and fee increases be another reasons kids ‘have to’ (more likely this falls under ‘expected to’ category) take out more loans?
Or, some schools could overestimate cost of attendance and give loans to cover the miscellaneous/non direct costs, and the student, who doesn’t know better, has parents take Parent PLUS loans to cover those?
So many students here don’t distinguish between direct costs and indirect costs!
In my experience, the problem isn’t too many loans that you didn’t need, but not enough financial aid, and not enough distinction between solid loans (federal loans) and other types of loans (Parent PLUS, private loans).
OP originally sad, “forcing you to take out more loans than you had intended.” If OP changed this, I missed it. So maybe a kid wants to cap it at, say, 2k in loans, but the package needs the full 5.5. ? Or a family wants no loans, but gets them added into the offer.
I’m at least one person who brought up packaging loans. The fed loan amounts go up for 2nd and 3rd years, so any tuition hike would be covered, in theory.