Right now I am receiving aid offers from schools and getting very little in grants. My AGI for the tax forms submitted for FAFSA was $115,000, but my household is only single income (father makes $81,000 a year), and my mom took out around $34,000 from her retirement and was unemployed. My FAFSA is telling me that my EFC is $25,000 a year, which seems unreasonably high considering that’s almost 1/3 of my dad’s yearly income. Should I try to edit/resubmit? Just a bit worried that it will reset the aid process for schools that are still processing…
Did mom take out the $34K from retirement to use to pay for living expenses, or did she roll that over to another retirement plan? If not rolled over, that will count as income.
If a rollover, there was a little box to check on FAFSA that one of the parents did an IRA rollover in 2020. If that box wasn’t checked, FAFSA can be corrected.
Does your family have assets/savings? That EFC sounds about right to me based on ours (my AGI is significantly lower - like 1/3 lower - than $115K with limited assets and our FAFSA EFC is around $17K (and goes up a few thousand under the CSS due to home equity). I’m not saying that you have $25K lying around or that that is an amount possible for your family to come up with on an annual basis - it obviously assumes you’ve been saving for college for the past 18 years as do most EFC numbers - but I think the calculation is probably correct. Unless as stated above your mom rolled that IRA distribution over. In that case it is not counted as income for FAFSA purposes and you need to amend the FAFSA. Also make sure that you used the AGI number for your dad’s salary, not his gross salary.
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I think the number sounds about right, too. Our income is in the middle of what you and Juno say and the EFC is in the middle, too. It is also important to note that the EFC from the FAFSA is used to determine eligibility for Pell grants and that each school can (and will) calculate what they think your family can pay using the data as they see fit.
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Yes, the EFC sounds correct. Yes, it’s high, but it’s correct. It’s just a number that helps determine federal aid, and most colleges do not provide grants that will bridge the difference between federal aid available & the EFC. Your mom’s withdrawal will be counted as income. If she still has not been able to return to work, or if she’s back to work but her income is significantly lower than the $34,000 retirement withdrawal, you can talk to the school(s) about the possibility of a special circumstances review of parent income (to adjust to actual current income). If her current income is more than the $34,000, though, there is no reason to ask for the review.
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If the income from 2021 and 2022 will just be your father’s (with no withdrawal by your mother that shows as income) then it is worth explaining to colleges financial aid offices this discrepancy from the 2020 tax year. If your mother is now working or your father’s income has increased significantly since 2020, then it would be had to justify to them.