<p>Has any parent filled out the FAFSA before your child was a senior to get an accurate family contribution figure?</p>
<p>There are various fafsa estimators on the web which I found to give a fair ballpark efc. Your efc isn’t what you will pay for college, though. Most schools do not meet need, meaning you will pay more than your efc.</p>
<p>If your family finances are straightforward, meaning you don’t own a business or have income from sources other than your job, the NPC’s (net price calculators) on individual college websites seem to be a better estimate of actual cost and family contribution.</p>
<p>X-posted w glopop.
Remember FAFSA does not dispense funds, it clarifies your eligibilty for PELL grants and possibly subsidized as opposed to unsubsidized loans.</p>
<p>Most schools do not offer any aid beyond self-help to most students, ( loans/ work study) although there may be outside merit awards available.</p>
<p>Ive found that a quick & dirty way to estimate FAFSA amount for many people( who do not own a business, or real estate beyond their main residence) is to assume 1/4 of before tax income of <$100,000 annual salary and for before tax income of above $100,000, 1/3 is generally assumed to be available, sometimes more.</p>
<p>Remember EFC is not expected from current income alone, but also from savings and loans.
It also can not be restated enough, that most colleges do not meet EFC, especially considering that the schools which offer need based aid are usually private, and have their own financial forms that will disclose additional assets to be tapped.</p>
<p>I’m not sure doing a FAFSA a year in advance will help you any more than doing a net price calculator. You would need to estimate your income, taxes paid, assets for the REAL year to get an estimate. Since tax tables change, and your income and assets will likely vary as well…why not do the NPC on each college website?</p>
<p>Also keep in mind that the MOST generous schools also require a Profile or their own school form for institutional need based award calculations. This looks more in depth at your finances.</p>
<p>Thanks for all the input, makes sense!</p>
<p>Your FAFSA EFC is not your “family contribution” as the name may suggest. Not at all.</p>
<p>Colleges are NOT obligated to take a family’s EFC and only have them pay that much. Most colleges do NOT have the funds to “meet need”.</p>
<p>FAFSA is a federal form for federal aid…which isn’t much.</p>
<p>FAFSA EFC is rather meaningless for those whose EFCs are beyond Pell Grants (EFCs greater than about 6000). </p>
<p>For instance, a student could apply to a school that costs $50k and the student my have an EFC of $10,000. The student might ONLY get a $5500 student loan and nothing else. The family would have to pay nearly $40k…which is obviously MUCH larger than their $10k EFC.</p>
<p>Each fall the formula for the next version of the FAFSA is published. You can find it by googling EFC Formula 20XX where XX is the second half of the academic year that you will need. The formula does change a bit from one year to the next, and sometimes it is revised just before the website goes live in January.</p>
<p>Here is the link to the 2014-2015 edition. Print out the PDF, and work through it on paper to see what factors most affect your federal EFC, and to learn what information you will need to have available when you do sit down to file it for real.</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.ifap.ed.gov/efcformulaguide/attachments/091913EFCFormulaGuide1415.pdf[/url]”>http://www.ifap.ed.gov/efcformulaguide/attachments/091913EFCFormulaGuide1415.pdf</a></p>
<p>The OP may need to do some more exploring about how financial aid works at most schools. Yes, the top schools (ivies, etc) give very good aid to those who qualify. but those schools also use CSS Profile.</p>
<p>Edited to add…</p>
<p>From past posts it does look like you’re looking at top schools. Most/all will use CSS Profile.</p>
<p>The family would have to pay nearly $40k</p>
<p>oops…meant to write…the family would have to pay nearly $45k</p>
<p>Yes I am clear on the difference between fafsa and profile but what got me thinking about if anyone had completed an early fafsa came from thinking about early action applications senior year. It occurred to me that parents are asked to estimate finances when applying before Feb 1, where for many families finances may not change from junior year to senior year significantly and if there were an early fafsa or early profile, that may aid in the “estimating” that needs to be completed on EA applications.</p>
<p>The better option is to run the Net Price Calculators on the web sites of the schools of interest.</p>
<p>If you want your EFC - which is all you’d get from filling out the FAFSA - just use a FAFSA calculator like <a href=“https://fafsa.ed.gov/FAFSA/app/f4cForm[/url]”>https://fafsa.ed.gov/FAFSA/app/f4cForm</a></p>