<p>What's the most reliable/accurate FAFSA calculator on the web?</p>
<p>No one can really answer this question for you as there are too many variables concerning your net EFC:</p>
<p>Some schools use professional judgement
Some FA offices will make corrections once they receive your signed tax forms</p>
<p>You will get an EFC when you file your FAFSA ( remember that the E= estimated)</p>
<p>to my knowledge the efc calculator at finaid.org is pretty good. however sybbie is right--there are too many variables.</p>
<p>Finaid. It's nailed our EFC to the dollar for the last two years.</p>
<p>The FAFSA4caster (fafsa4caster.org) is a government estimator that asks almost a many questions as the FAFSA, but you can do it in about 15 minutes if you have all your information available. At the end, it will not only give you an estimate of your EFC, but also an estimate of how much federal grant, work-study, and loan money you would qualify for based on that EFC.</p>
<p>ive found finaid to be accurate- but since you can now fill out FAFSA- and update it with correct numbers- why not just use that?</p>
<p>FinAid calculator is faster to complete than FAFSA-- and it allows you to run a number of hypothetical scenarios to see how the EFC changes as a result. It wouldn't be recommended to submit 3 or 4 FAFSA's with different asset numbers, or different number of household members, for example.</p>
<p>FinAid results show how the EFC is broken down-- what portion comes from parental assets, parental income, student assets, and student income. So you can quickly scope out whether a transfer of assets from reportable to non-reportable (say, for example, spending 20K in parental assets to purchase a car) will have an impact on the EFC. So you can prepare your finances to your best advantage on the date that you actually file FAFSA.</p>
<p>Plus-- with the FinAid calculator, you can have it calculate both the Federal (FAFSA) methodology and the Institutional (Profile) methodology based on a single set of data entry. THEN- you can go back a page and change one data point, and see how it affects both FAFSA and Profile EFC's.</p>
<p>Bottom line, spending 30 or so minutes "playing" with the FinAid calculator will give you a much better understanding of how the various data points affect the resulting EFC, and that allows you to make the appropriate (legal and ethical) adjustments to your finances to maximize your potential aid.</p>
<p>FinAid is definitely faster, but it doesn't include as many financial areas as the 4caster - which is why it's faster. This only matters if some of those different areas are relevant to your situation.</p>
<p>You can also run the 4caster multiple times to explore different scenarios.</p>
<p>Besides covering all the bases, the nice thing about the 4caster is that it tells you what government aid you're likely to qualify for based on your EFC - how much Pell grant, how much SEOG, how much work-study, how much Perkins or Stafford loan, etc. It is more tedious to fill out all that info, though.</p>