<p>Here are my facts:</p>
<p>Living as a expat abroad until S2 graduates from HS in 2012. At that point S1 will have 1 year of college to go at about 30K.</p>
<p>Could have enough cash saved for S1 last year plus most of the 4 years at a private for S2.
This would be our only savings beside 401K.</p>
<p>The end of our expat assignment will mean a great reduction in earnings for us, and as it is, our stated income is greatly inflated due to things that the company is paying for us (housing etc) in an expensive foreign country. We are not getting off scott free as we still have our home in the US and are still paying our mtg and all upkeep.</p>
<p>With that much money in the bank initially and an inflated tax return, I don't expect any FA initially.
Do I just wait and do the calculations every year to see if something is kicking in?
Should I expect our EFC not to take into consideration that we are draining all of our available savings? I know the ask about you bank accounts.</p>
<p>We are really nervous about spending all of our savings for a high priced college if he gets accepted.</p>
<p>BTW, would I just check the box on the application that says were not applying for FA?</p>
<p>I suggest you run the calculators and submit FAFSA every year no matter what. You might, for example, qualify for subsidized loans and there is no real downside to that. For another example, PA has a $3K SciTech grant for certain majors after freshman year, and it requires a certain GPA, but it also requires FAFSA submittal even if there is no need-based aid given. I don’t know if the SciTech grants will survive state budget problems, but there may be similar grants available to your kid.</p>
<p>As a rule, colleges are not going to take possible future events into account. Who knows what will really happen? It’s up to YOU to do that. We’re in the same sort of situation where we know that there is a good chance of reduced income before we finish with our kids educations which has made us have to shift priorities and limit what we can give our current college kids so that something is left for our youngest. Maybe we’ll get lucky and something will turn up but we can’t take the chance but we can’t expect the aid calculators to take that uncertainty into account.</p>
<p>Regarding those aid calculators-- I ran estimated numbers for next year on the College Board EFC calculator after posting my thread Planning for next year. That thing is SO off. I do not know why they even bother having it! It showed that our EFC would go up (no surprise), but it came out LOWER than our EFC is now (based on last year’s numbers when we had lower income). I looked up a copy of the calculation I ran last summer and, sure enough, that was way off to. So what is the point of having a calculator that obviously isn’t taking into account numbers or formulas that the real-world FAOs are?</p>
<p>Thanks! Is this the same as the calculator and tables in the book Paying for College without Going Broke?</p>
<p>I haven’t attempted that one yet and thought I could get a fairly accurate read from the College Board calculator. But, obviously, I didn’t, so I’m going to have to plow through the other one(s).</p>