<p>Harvard's new financial aid thing about no parent contribution if income is under 60K... does anyone know if this still applies if your house equity is around 500-600K?</p>
<p>uh...I'd contact the HFAI office and talk to them. That sounds like a fairly unique situation to me.</p>
<p>You should contact the financial aid office directly at <a href="http://fao.fas.harvard.edu%5B/url%5D">http://fao.fas.harvard.edu</a>.</p>
<p>actually it's kind of like my situation...
Except im not applying to harvard (MIT bi-atch!)
But my mom was disabled for almost 5 years and she was a single parent, so all she got was like $200 child support and some disability checks in the beginning.
But yeah im kinda wondering how scholarships will look at my situation; I live in a pretty expensive mountainside suburb in CA, so my house is 3 level, 3 bedroom 2 bath with a medium yard and its probably worth I think about 600K-700K last time I looked around my neighborhood. But my mom's mortgaged it so many times we've both lost count!
Any advice?</p>
<p>yeah, i tried contacting the financial aid office but they just said, "each situation is unique, we would have to see everything in order to tell you". so i thought people could have a general idea based on real experiences.</p>
<p>hmm, i come from a single parent family (mom makes 21K, sister in college), and our home equity jumped in the past decade cuz well houses are expensive in california. the house is worth around 750-800K but we haven't paid off 200K yet (ironically, the cost of the house itself was 200K when we bought it). a teacher told me that my family should take the home equity out and put it in a retirement plan (not considered in FAFSA/CSS calculations for EFC).</p>
<p>You can try the Princeton Financial Aid Estimator on its website. You can also try the College Board's financial aid estimator. Remember - each school's method is different, but it should give you a ballpark figure as to what your package might look like.</p>
<p>I have a very similar case to yours and according to Princeton's calculator, we would only have to pay about 2,000 a year.</p>
<p>Is home equity is exempt from private school calculations? </p>
<p>Is this the reason lot of my fellow recent immigrants goes to such an extent to buy very big houses - Chinese, Indians, and Pakistanis. These people tend to buy bigger houses in sizes. Does it help in hiding income or savings through equity on houses during college times?</p>
<p>Home equity is calculated for private schools (institutional methodology on Collegeboard) the only exception is Princeton.</p>
<p>If you buy big houses, you'll have paid off less by the time you go to college and so you have less home equity available for college education.</p>
<p>So is the CollegeBoard's EFC calculator acurate in predicting aid from Harvard?</p>
<p>Yes, the Financial Aid Office referred me to it. They did say, however, that it may differ a bit.</p>