I’m not new to CSS and FAFSA, ours is complicated and I’m not good at it. This time around, second kid, I will be very busy and would like to hand it off to an expert. Are there people out there for hire who do this? Not looking to find loopholes or do anything that’s not legit, just want to avoid the stress and get it right. Thanks.
Merged two identical threads. People posting the same thing on both
ED
If the money is right, I’m sure that you can pay someone to do pretty much anything. The big question is, what’s the cost and what kind of job will they do…
I would just set aside a couple of hours of YOUR time, and do it. It is not going to be a mess this year…as it will use the same incime and tax info as LAST year (2015) which you have already done…right? The only difference will be assets.
If you hire someone to fill in the blanks, you are still going to need to get the infor prepared for THEM to fill in the blanks. Once you have done that, you may as well do the forms yourself.
ETA in April, you wrote this when inquiring about accuracy of net price calculators. So…is your financial situation straight forward…or is it complicated?? Please clarify.
I completed both the FAFSA and CSS Profile this week. It just takes a couple of hours of focus with your information in front of you. The “link to IRS” feature is nice to fill in the blanks from your 2015 tax returns.
I was going to say exactly what thumper1 said. The hard part is gathering exact numbers for your info. After that you could probably have your kid input them. But there are people who do this. Someone comes to our high school every year offering services–ask your guidance counsellor.
I did the FAFSAs for my two kids yesterday. The first one, which was the kid I had the hard time with the FSA ID last year, went through easily. I couldn’t get the password to go through for the other one, when last year hers was the only one of the three of us to go through on the first try. I couldn’t get her questions to go through either, and I don’t know if it was because of capitalization of the secret words (tried it different ways, got locked out). They sent a code to her email account, she was in class, it timed out so I had to do it again after she could text me the code.
So, have your paperwork when you do it, and either your child with you or available with her email/phone access. The only down side was that I couldn’t go right from one to the next fafsa, so had to do the IRS retrieval twice. Extra 5 minutes.
I did reset the password and the questions for daughter 2, I noticed that the password will expire on 12/31/16, and there didn’t seem to be anything I could do to change that (even thought I’d just reset the password), so I assume that next year logging in will be a problem because of the expired password.
thumper1, I don’t remember, but I think I was responding to the part of the thread about divorce, which we’re not, so probably I meant straightforward in that respect.
twoinanddone, pretty exasperating, but glad to hear you got it done.
Everyone, thank you for your input!
Fafsa was a breeze but the CSS took me more than a few hours. I gave myself a few days, bits at a time, because I was so concerned about some issues. But I agree: you need to gather everything anyway and determine your stance, so all an outsider would save you is the input. And frankly, you’d likely go back over the whole thing anyway, to check for errors.
Frankly you SHOULD go over the whole,thing if someone else inputs the data…or even if you do.
Honestly, after you have collected all the data, I’m not sure how much time you would save having someone else enter it…on either form.