So my parents submitted a FAFSA a loong time ago and a school recently contacted us saying there were some discrepancies between our FAFSA and CSS. Here’s what we did today:
reported child support (previously 0, now like....3000?)
reported pre-tax retirement funds, like 401k (previously 0, now 100k+)
edited savings (previously 30k, now 5k)
edited savings for retirement (previously 0, now 30k)
Annnnd our EFC used to be 15k, and now it’s over 110k.
Our income is like right at 110k. Does this make any sense??? Does FAFSA expect my parents to use retirement funds for my college? I am so confused. My parents are looking for errors right now and I wanted to know if this is normal. ANy advice would be amazing, especially because the faid deadline for many of my schools was Feb 1st.
This isn’t right. If their income was only $110k for that year, they couldn’t have 100k+ in retirement funds. You only report the ones you made in that tax year, and those can’t be 401k of $110k in one year, even for 2 married people.
What are you reporting for this? You do not report qualified retirement savings for previous years.
You’re correcting both the FAFSA and CSS? Be sure you understand what each asks for, what they mean by certain questions. Yes, the CSS can ask about QRP totals. But make sure pretax contributions are properly reported for the year, where that’s what’s asked.
If you only corrected this today, I’m surprised you got a revised FAFSA SAR today.
On top of this, please be sure you understand how fin aid works for your schools.
You do have a lot of major changes on the submission. That makes me wonder how accurate are those numbers? The school will likely ask you for documents for verification.
What did the college ask you for? If you were selected for verification…the college asked you for information to document something…I’m betting the college did NOT ask you to go on and change your FAFSA.
So…tell us what the college asked for.
When you are selected for verification because something is “off” between your financial aid forms…or whatever…the college usually gives you a list of what they want you to provide for documentation…and the COLLEGE figures this out.
So…they might want copies of your parent and your tax returns, or W2 forms, or something.
You report the income from the 2016 tax return, that can be done via FAFSA IRS data retrieval tool and then you input income from work for parent 1 and 2 manually.
You report untaxed income of child support received in 2016, you report pretax 401k contributions that your parents made to their 401k in the year 2016 (not the total balance in the 401k account for FAFSA). That number can be found on their 2016 W2 in box 12.
You do not change the amount of assets in bank accounts and investments that you reported when you first filed FAFSA. Only if the number was an error. If your balance decreased because you spent the money in the meantime, you cannot now use the lower number.
The school should be making any necessary changes at this stage - if they are questioning something because they have conflicting evidence, they should gather the required documentation & make the necessary updates to the FAFSA. I encourage you to contact them to talk about this.
The EFC should be around $30k I think for a family of 3 with $110,000 income, $30,000 savings and untaxed income ($3,000 child support and 401k contributions from 2016).