It could get done for free, but many people choose not to do it. I know people who pay their accountants to fill out the FAFSA. It is a service offered on the online tax programs for $30 or $50 dollars, which of course is just a convenience (although that won’t work anymore with prior/prior unless you use the same tax program for 2 years and pay to save your info) and you have to decide if it is worth it to pay $30 for something you can fill out yourself.
I know a lot of people who would rather go to the dentist than do the FAFSA or a tax form. Most of those people are NOT on CC, but they exist. I’d rather do paperwork and keep my $30, but others hate it.
I don’t mean to confuse the OP, and agree that FAFSA, if the information is entered correctly, will yield the same result whether you fill it out or your accountant does or you pay a consultant,but some people like the convenience of paying someone else to do it. Her friend had a positive result using an outside source and may truly believe her results were better because she paid for it to be completed for her. We all know a lot of people who got merit awards to Ivies or a full ride to be on the baseball team at a D3 school, and you can’t convince them otherwise.
The Fafsa gets easier after the first time. But maybe this included the CSS Profile? We don’t know what this “huge” offer was.
There are questions on the CSS that you can ache over. I benefitted from having an amazingly FA-savvy friend to help guide me through a few those. There are some parts where you have to make a judgment call. So maybe OPs friend got more support for the cost than OP realizes. And maybe that cost wasn’t that high-? We don’t know enough.
Yes, you can do the forms yourself.
Frankly, my CPA understood jack nothing about FA.
Turbo Tax spits out most everything needed to complete the FAFSA. Makes it simple for me. I agree the CSS is a much more complicated beast.
It seems people missed the point due to a bad analogy. After all, it is not like hiring a tax adviser that he/she may find some tax credits one may not know. FAFSA is simple enough that it was meant to be filled by the student.
Every year, my D’s high school host a financial aid meeting. Each time they emphasis what the first “F” of FAFSA stands for. Also, they warn us those lookalike websites (FAFSA.xxx) that try to make money by filling those simple forms.
There are, or can be, some questions on the FAFSA that an expert may answer in a different way than ‘just a mom’. Look at the number of questions on CC every year about ‘what do I call an insurance payment, income or an asset?’ What if it is unemployment Insurance (which isn’t insurance at all)?
And if you think the average, dependent student can fill out a fafsa, you’re dreaming. I filled out the first one when my kids were 17. They had no idea how to answer questions (and it took me a while) about my income, my retirement, my bank accounts, whether I owned any other assets. They did not know how a 401k works. Could they fill out the next one? I doubt it or at least not easily.
I just had to walk my daughter through a passport application. She had questions about things like where she was born (she is foreign born), where I was born, did she want a passport book or card. A simple form can be confusing to those not used to filling out forms.
This student said it was a huge expense. What is considered a huge expense?
Also, some families can afford this extra help, and others simply cannot. That is why there is a FAFSA help line,mand a help section on the form. If you can’t afford a huge expense, then you should use these things.
In addition, if this person was just completing the form, and nothing more…the aid would have been the same regardless of who was filling in the blanks.