Distributing 529 plan.

As @twoinanddone shows, your assets decrease one dollar, your EFC goes down somewhere between 5 and 5.6 cents (depending on the financial aid methodology the school uses).

However, the financial aid is very sensitive to increases in income. If you sell a stock and have to declare capital gains, that can have an effect on your EFC up to 47 cents on the dollar of additional income.