Interpreting results from College Board EFC calculators

<p>Dear All,</p>

<p>I just ran our figures through the EFC calculators at EFC</a> Calculator: How Much Money for College Will You Be Expected to Contribute? and found that with the Institutional Methodology, our estimated EFC is 5k less than with the Federal Methodology. Do any of you have a suggestion as to why this would be possible? Could I have entered something on the wrong line? We don't own any property.</p>

<p>Here are numbers for you to run so you can check my results:</p>

<p>Parent 1 Age: 53
Parent 2 Age: 51
Student Age: 16</p>

<p>AGI: 74,000
P1 Earned Income: 90,000
P2 Earned Income: 3,000
US Income Taxes: 6,000
Parents' Cash: 70,000
Student's Cash: 1,000
Parents' Investments: 6,000</p>

<p>FM results: 20,779
IM results: 15,793</p>

<p>I did not create a College Board Login for myself when I ran this, I just followed as many steps as I could without it, and then clicked on the "Finances" button which put me into the data entry section.</p>

<p>Thanks in advance for your counsel!</p>

<p>WHOOPS!!</p>

<p>I left out Parents' Untaxed Income: 20,500
(Max deposit to 401k for 2008)</p>

<p>Which of course explains how we got to that AGI.</p>