I have been accepted to and will be attending a private college where my total bill after 4 years will be well over $200,000. My family situation is this: my parents total combined income is roughly $220,000 per year, but all of their money pretty much ends up going to the heavy loan repayments that they co-signed for for my 2 elder siblings, of which their combined loan payment amounts for their 2 college loan amounts is well over $500,000 at the moment. That said, the purpose of this post is to ask if their is a way that I can gain “independent status” on FAFSA and separate myself from my family’s difficult financial situation somehow, so as to not put even more of a financial burden on my parents who are already spending all of their combined incomes paying off my siblings’ combined half of a million dollars in loans? I am willing to work my way through school if need be through work-study loans, so as long my parents don’t end up with another 200k to add on top of their 500k that they are already paying. Is there a way to claim ‘independent’ status on FAFSA, so as to not involve the rest of my family on FAFSA? Thank you in advance for your replies.
If you are under the age of 24, you will not be considered as an independent student unless you are married, on active duty, or have children yourself.
https://studentaid.ed.gov/sa/sites/default/files/fafsa-dependency.pdf
If you can’t afford to attend this university, you need to find a school that you can afford. If your parents are in this kind of debt, they probably will not be approved for any further loans for your education.
What is wrong with going to your instate schools or an affordable college?
No…you cannot gain independent status for financial aid purposes just because your parents are overextended on their debt.
But please…learn a lesson from this, find an affordable college for yourself, where you won’t need the kind of loans that your siblings/parents already have taken.
In other words…find a school that costs far less than $50,000 a year.
ETA…there is no way you could get $50,000 a year in loans…or work enough hours to pay that amount annually while going to school full time. None. You won’t be able to,get loans yourself because you have insufficient income and no collateral.
And if you did manage to earn $50,000 in a year…that income would be used on your subsequent FAFSA and would very significantly reduce any need based aid you might have received in prior years.
Your plan is flawed. You need to look at far less expensive colleges.
No.
No.
You need to attend an affordable school. It is very unfortunate your parents have placed themselves in such a terrible financial situation and failed to plan for your college education.
Do you have the stats to receive a full tuition or full ride scholarship?
There are 13 questions used to determine independence. You don’t qualify. But here are the questions, if you can answer YES to any, then you are independent, scroll down about half way.
https://studentaid.ed.gov/sa/fafsa/filling-out/dependency
Your parents took out an unreasonable amount of loans. It is maybe reasonable for your parent to pay 1/3 from savings, 1/3 from current income and 1/3 from loans. But if they can’t afford that then they probably shouldn’t have done it. If they can afford this amount in loan for you then I guess it is a personal family decision. But no, you can’t transfer the financial burden of college from your parent to your college.
If you have to repay more than your student debt, do your future self a favor and don’t cosign on more. Not worth it unless it is just a little extra. You will spend your adult life paying it off. Not fun. You will be paying loans when others are saving for car and house and able to afford going out, an apartment, etc. And after all the years you will have nothing in the bank because you had to pay loans. And how much a dent do you think you will put into paying that tuition with work/study. Work/study award is part of aid and I don’t know if you will get any. Even if you can get a job at school anyway, you will make about 10 an hour. If you work more than 20 hours it will affect your grades. You want to work about 12 hrs a week. You can’t make more than 3k a year and 3k in summer at first.
You personally can borrow:
Dependent
Freshman 5,500
sophomore 6,500
jr 7,500
sr 7,500
Split the above amounts into semesters: freshman = $2750 per semester. It’s really not that much.