And do all of the private lenders even wait until graduation for repayment?
Parent Plus loans have somewhat better terms than private loans, so if your mom can’t afford taking out Plus loans she should not take out private loans. Especially since you have a sibling.
The divorce rate is 60%.
Courtney, source?
The general divorce rate is 60%, but not necessarily for people with children going to college. Some people are divorced multiple times while others are never divorced.
Anyway…I found the NPC worked just fine for schools that only use FAFSA. I’m a single parent and have one at a public and one at a private. Not everything showed on the NPC, like outside scholarships or state grants, but amounts within the school’s control were correct. Others report the NPC at Cornell and other elite schools come out within a few thousand of the final numbers.
I disagree.
Yes, but the spikes tend to happen before kids reach college age.
<<<<
By 2009, Alan Ens borrowed about $25,000 in federal loans and $75,000 in private loans to pay for his jazz guitar degree from University of the Arts in Philadelphia.
“Six months after I got out, (one lender) was like ‘We need $600 a month. We do no forbearances, no deferments. We don’t give you a lower payment,’” he says.
Four years later, Ens works for an after-school music program and has joined the nonprofit Student Debt Crisis, which advocates for higher-education reform. He has kept his federal loans in check but defaulted on some of the private loans, making his debt load about $110,000. To make matters worse, some of Ens’ private loans were co-signed by his mother. One lender currently garnishes Ens’ mother’s wages, and Ens pays her back.
“I wish I had that information: If you have this degree, what generally do people make from it?” Ens says. **“The (federal) government loan has been cool with deferments and forbearances and looking at my income. I don’t know why I assumed that’s what all the loans would do.” **
[/QUOTE]
I have a problem with someone borrowing a lot assuming that there would be IBR…it’s almost like stealing when someone goes in with that thinking.
It’s almost like some are going into these loans thinking that they can somehow turn them into “grants”.
I think the OP did not like the message (and that is understandable). But it is reality. Don’t further damage your family financial situation. You need to look at other cheaper options.
The fact is that your father has been AWOL for ~14 years. The likelihood that he will reliably provide $15,000 for 4 consecutive years is roughly zero. Unless he gave you a lump sum of $60,000 up front (and don’t forget confiscatory gift taxes) I would not count on a penny. Imagine if he came through with one year’s financing on a 4 year deal and then bailed? You would be worse than when you started.
I would go to a state school for which your father could (potentially) pay 100% and give your mother, who has done all the parenting work for 14 years, a break.
Sorry, I re-read your post and realized that your father already bailed. A state school, or maybe community college this year are the two viable options.
Gift taxes are not a concern to the recipient, and it is unlikely there would be any in this case (parent paying for tuition) anyway.
Plus…the parent lives in Iran.
Gift taxes are not confiscatory, relevant for a 60K lump sum, or owed by the recipient (in this case, the OP).
Not much fact checking on this thread…
A tangent to the thread but:
It occurred to me that the father lives in Pakistan so gift taxes would not apply. But if he were an American taxpayer, I I think gift taxes might be relevant. The child is not a dependent. If the father does not write the check directly to the school and simply wires a large sum of money to an individual relative, that is a gift. If he put the money in a 529 account with the child as the beneficiary or paid the school directly then it would not be a gift. Yes, the gifter must pay the tax but the amount of tax is important as the recipient needs to net the $60,000 not ~$48,000.
IF the gift tax applied, the father would file a form with the IRS and IF the father had given the child millions of dollars over the father’s lifetime (or millions total as gifts over his lifetime), a tax might be due from the father’s estate at death. the recipient of the gift does not pay. The IRS doesn’t confiscate part of the gift to pay taxes.
“Confiscatory gift taxes” – I love it when people make up these ideas. A few things about it:
I stand corrected. I am a bit out of date on gift taxes. Now you can give $14,000 per year to a recipient tax free and and none of the gift counts toward a lifetime exemption of ~$5.4 million which gets intermixed with inheritance taxes. Sorry for the misinformation.
From the OP…father lives in Iran.
But really…this does not matter. The OP has already said…the father is not giving him money for college.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/12/02/divorce-rate-declining-_n_6256956.html
Marriages from the 90’s have a 35% divorce rate. Marriages from 2,000’s is at 15% though I’m sure that will go up over time. Data from this survey says divorce rate spiked in marriages from 70’s/80’s and has been going down as the avg age of getting married has moved to late twenties.
Specific-percentage-arguments aside, NPCs are often NOT accurate for families. That’s all I was saying, and that is a fact. Recommending you run the NPC is a good starting place, but so often it’s prescribed by itself, like it will give the family all the answers. It won’t.
In my case, all the NPCs we ran were wildly, wildly off. I really did not appreciate posting and people telling me to “Run the NPC” to figure out which schools I could afford. Often, figuring out the answer is way more complex than that.
Tl;dr good starting place, not a one-size-fits-all answer. That’s all.
I think that the best thing you could possibly do is to live at home and go to community college for 1-2 years while working as much as possible to save to be able to transfer to Loyola for your last 2-3 years of college.