I am a state employee and I reported my retirement assets as retirement funds, not as regular investments. On the CSS Profile there is a separate section that asks for “Current Value of Retirement Plan”. This should not be double-reported under Current Checking and Savings or under Current Investments.
If I recall corretly, the FAFSA doesn’t ask for this at all.
I believe this is correct…pension balances are reported on the Profile as retirement assets…not as regular assets in that regular asset section. In fact, the directions specifically state that these should not be included in that section. @BelknapPoint
Yes. Which also means that if you have a summer job (or campus job), now that money can go towards your parent’s contribution requirement, if that’s what your family wants, instead of going towards your student contrubution.
From FAFSA:
Investments do not include the home you live in, the value of life insurance, ABLE accounts, retirement plans (401[k] plans, pension funds, annuities, non-education IRAs, Keogh plans, etc.) or cash, savings and checking accounts already reported in questions 40 and 88.
I don’t have access to the current version of Profile to check what the instructions are there for reporting pension funds, but they are probably similar to FAFSA.
OP- the best thing to do is to sit down with your parents and walk through the forms you have filled out. We are all suggesting things that are common errors- but only your parents know what is in each account, how it is titled, if they’ve double counted their pension as both a retirement asset AND an investment. Save yourselves a lot of grief- and do the sit-down together.
Also- be careful about an overly optimistic view on outside scholarships (unless you have already been awarded one or more, and have already read the fine print). I sat on a scholarship committee for a foundation for several years, and our rules changed annually (not to be mean, but just to keep up with changes in financial aid, realities in our student’s lives, etc.) Some scholarships are “last dollar” scholarships-- intended to bridge that final hurdle for low income students AFTER every single penny in aid had been exhausted by the student. So buying a warm coat for a kid from Florida going to Maine who had never seen winter? Yes, we’d do it. Buying a computer for a kid who had only used the one in the school library? Yes, we’d do it. Pay for health insurance for a kid whose family plan didn’t cover out of state? Yes, we’d do it. We would likely not have awarded you the full amount if you had not already maxed out on the federal loans. The intent of our donors was to help every capable kid we could get to college and succeed- not to allow families to avoid a reasonable amount of debt just because they didn’t like loans.
So if you are looking at some local outside scholarships, make sure the rules specifically state that the funds can be used to replace loans AND the student contribution. (We required that kids who were eligible for work/study accept WS. Why? Because working a 10 hour a week campus job is good for time management, and work in general is good for a college student to get experience).
I don’t want to mess with your head- but outside scholarships have their own quirks and you need to understand what they are so you don’t end up with a gap next August that you can’t fill.
Same with 401k ,457, IRA accounts. They are reported on the CSS profile as retirement accounts and should not be double-counted as an investment or cash account.
Please print out your CSS Profile and go over it line by line. Make sure every entry is accurate.
Make sure the parent income and/or assets are NOT also in the student section.
Ask your parents if they have tax deferred retirement accounts. And if yes, ask if a rollover was done in 2020. Just find out.
But go line by line on that Profile form…and look for any possible errors…misplaced decimal point or added zeros….so $30000 instead of $3000 for example. Check each item.
Also make sure that the 529 that your parents have for you is reported under parent assets, not under student assets. That is the correct thing to do and it is also treated more favorably for financial aid purposes.
And you haven’t mentioned which Ivy you are talking about, but if it is Brown, there are two more (smallish) things they do to help students on financial aid. One is that for the first year, they will pay for your books and school supplies . The second is that they provide a $300 clothing allowance for winter clothes. I’m not sure if that is for every year or just the first year, and I don’t know if other schools do the same, but wanted to mention these two items in case the information was helpful.
That is how I would interpret it.
I would make an appointment with the financial aid office. Those numbers seem oddly off considering that your parents make 30k a year. I’m thinking that your parents might have mistakenly declared their retirement as an asset.