<p>My dad, being busy and equally uneducated about financial aid as I, entrusted me with the responsibility(burden?) of deciding what to do about paying for college. And after looking at various sites that were all too flashy/biased, I decided to ask the experts :)</p>
<p>I am attending NYU in the fall, pursuing an accelerated BA/master's program. Before you freak out, I recieved a 20K/year merit scholarship. So around 25K a year still needs to be paid, which means about 100K for a four year undergrad (I might try to get undergrad done in 3, or 3.5 years, but I'll ignore that for right now.)</p>
<p>I'm an only child, and neither of my parents work. My mother has not worked since I was 12 (she had a stroke, recieves disability pay) and my father has not worked for about two years. This year he started recieving retirement pay from AT&T. However, my mother also has a ton of medical/rehab expenses not covered by insurance, because her rehabilitation is foremost in our family right now. Therefore, although their income is really 85K a year, my mother's medical expenses are about 32K, and our insurance is about 12K. Which leaves about 41K for everything else. Overall, our living expenses; taxes, food, credit card bills, utilities, etc. are about 46K a year, maybe a bit more.</p>
<p>The medical/rehab expenses will subside in a few years--my mother just underwent extensive/serious brain surgery last year, so this is still part of that "critical" period. However, based on her condition, basically neither of my parents will ever work again. My mother's disability pay will run until she is 65, which is 67K a year.</p>
<p>Although the financial aid department has recognized that our current (disposable) income is low, my parents also have a lot of assets, having saved a lot through the years. They right now have about 200K in cash, as well as 400K in stocks (but this is not really touchable, based on the stock market right now), and a few tracts of land in North Carolina.</p>
<p>To me, it seems as though the financial aid department would expect us to get sell off the property as well as some of the stocks, and then use some cash before they started offering up some substantial aid. As it is, I got a Stafford Loan for about 1500 dollars.</p>
<p>Basically, the question is, should my parents go for the fixed rate of tuition and pay for tuition tradtional-style? Or is there any kind of financial aid alternative we should look into?</p>