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the family contribution the NPC gave the parent was in excess of what they WANT to pay annually. To be honest…what a family wants to pay has no bearing on the financial aid calculation.
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Right! One of the posts suggests that they want their contribution each year to be 25% of what’s in the 529.
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if your wife not working reduces your EFC by $20,000 or so, she is likely earning enough to pay a good portion of college costs. So right now…put the money in the 529 accounts. Then when the kid starts college, use your wife’s current income to pay college costs only (since you don’t seem to think you need it for daily living expenses). You won’t be the first person to do this!
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Agreed! The OP is suggesting that they don’t “need” the wife’s income to live on, so why not start saving her income now?
It is short-sighted to give up her income (which is probably about $50k-60k per year), only to get more FA during the college years of 2-3 kids. She may find it difficult or impossible to re-enter the work world later. She may be considered to be “too old” at a time when companies will prefer hiring younger cheaper employees.
I removed my job from the NPC for the CSS Profile & FAFSA college my son is attending. I make just about enough to pay the COA they gave him.
The EFC barely dropped.
Therefore, my assumption is that our home equity, which is over 500K, has a much larger effect on my son’s COA and our EFC than our income.
HTH. You can try the same thing, with and without assets, with and without second income.
Rhandco, your primary home equity is not considered or even mentioned in the FAFSA…and the formula it uses to compute need based aid and your FAFSA EFC.
It is very possible that home equity of $500,000 could have a significant impact for Profile Schools especially if it is a college that doesn’t cap the amount of primary home equity tapped for the financial aid calculations.
It also doesn’t matter at most schools if your EFC is $55k or $40k or even $25k. At those levels, you’ll get no federal aid, and most school aid at most schools will just be loans. At the few schools that meet need, maybe it would make a difference of $10k or so as those schools often find that the $25k EFC is really $40k when all the assets are added back in and the value of the primary home, the vacation home, the 4 cars are added back in.
The OP is new to this FA game, and needs to figure out that dropping the $50k spouse’s salary might only net $5k because the biggest wage earner is still making 6 figures. If the family can reduce income to below $50k, great, there will be need based financial aid. If not, and the school doesn’t guarantee to meet full need, there is going to be a gap on the FA award, and loans will be included.
Thanks yes I am just at the beginning of understanding how COA gets determined. We will have enough in 529s for both kids to full pay in state tx public schools. Due to my DDs sport, recruiting starts very early in HS. We are trying to set expectations early for which schools are out of reach. The big publics are prob not realistic for her sport but some solid privates and D3 are. The issue is of course cost since they are 2x+ the publics. The sport can help with admissions but counting on much athletic $ seems risky and of course D3 offer no athletic $. DD is so far at near the top of her class (long way to go). I’m not sure if you can stack both merit and athletic awards at D1 schools or not.
@twoinanddone the wife not working was just a hypothetical, not something we are seriously contemplating. When I ran the npc for a college without her salary and it did make a large difference in coa. She is a teacher at <50k
You are a little confused - COA is COA; it doesn’t change with AGI.
@ccsouth
You seem to be misunderstanding the term COA. COA is the list price of a school including tuition, fees, room and board or other housing arrangement, transportation, personal expenses etc. It doesn’t change for a given year. You just look it up on the school’s website. What you seem to be talking about is your expected contribution that changes depending on what you enter in the NPCs.
the npc called it our cost which changes depending on what agi is used. Semantics.
Not really semantics and you will confuse everyone else on the forum using COA that way. Schools have a COA, individuals can have a net cost or expected contribution.
ETA: And actually regarding FAFSA and federal aid, COA is an official term that limits how much federal aid a student can receive. It is the published cost the school charges.
^ The published costs including both the the fixed billable amounts (tuition/RB/fees) and their projection of the misc (books, transpo, etc,) and discretionary (personal.) Not all is charged or billed. Eg, you can reduce personal expenses, rent books, etc.
Yes, you can stack athletic money and merit money and federal FA and some others. Usually, if you get athletic aid you cannot get need based FA from the school without it counting against the team’s maximum scholarships, so most coaches don’t allow it. The basic rule is that your daughter can receive any award available to any other kids in the school under the same conditions - merit awards based on grades and scores, federal aid, state aid, military GI bill money. At the school my daughter goes to there is merit aid available to robotics team members, children of alums, siblings, eagle scouts, etc. All those are available to anyone, not just athletes, so athletes can take them in addition to the sports money. Some stack, some don’t, and those rules have to be the same for everyone.
There are plenty of D2 schools with money, and depending on the sport, quite competitive.
@twoinanddone Thanks, we wouldn’t qualify for need based aid but good to know merit and athletic can be combined. We might just need to reset her list to schools where she will have an easier time getting merit aid. I guess its something families that are further along in the process have already figured out. The top students may not be able to attend the “top” schools due to being full pay and not qualifying for enough aid. Competing for merit aid would be difficult at many top schools due to a lack of standout ECs on top of her sport. If she is competing against non athletes I would guess merit would be hard to come by at the top schools.
Many schools have merit for all with certain gpa/score combos. It’s not really a competition as everyone can qualify for merit aid.
It is a balancing act of deciding if your athlete wants to play in college, at what level, and what kind of academics she’d like. Not everyone can play at Stanford and compete in the classroom too. My daughter found what we think is the perfect balance, a D2 school with very good merit aid, very good athletic aid, good engineering and good post grad placement. Because it is a new team, she played almost 100% of every game as a freshman (important to her). Friends went to D1 top schools with top sports competition, and yet they don’t get the playing time. Neither choice is better, just what is right for the student.
We looked at schools in D1, D2, and D3. All had pluses and minuses. Some of the D3’s were academically highly rated, but just weren’t the right school for her. Most of the D1’s were either not very good teams or she wouldn’t have received much money and no playing time. This D2 school just rang all the bells academically and for her sport and the price was right.