<p>My financial package includes $2000 per year for personal expenses and $2000 per year for transportation. Is that money broken up and disbursed to me every month or am I likely to be nickeled and dimed out of it?</p>
<p>Does your FA package include any “student contribution” or “work study”? If so, then likely the school will expect THAT money to be used for those purposes.</p>
<p>What exactly does your FA package include? </p>
<p>What is the COA breakdown?</p>
<p>books, tuition, fees, etc.</p>
<p>What does your FA package include? Write down the numbers…such as…</p>
<p>Grant XXX</p>
<p>Loan XXX</p>
<p>Work Study XXX</p>
<p>Parent contribution: XXX</p>
<p>Then write CoA…such as COA = $50k</p>
<p>College Work-Study Accepted - $2,500.00</p>
<p>Fresh. Academic Grant Accepted- $10,000.00</p>
<p>loans $15,250.00</p>
<p>coa= $33,000</p>
<p>Where is the remaining 5k (or so) coming from? </p>
<p>I’m a little confused when you said that your college is giving you 2k for books and personal expenses. Usually, 2k for books and personal expenses is considered part of the cost of attendence, not money given to you from the school. In general, colleges don’t give students aid for books, transportation, and other expenses (unless you have a huge merit scholarship). Colleges usually expect students/ families to pay these costs through summer earnings and work study. It’s usually possible to spend less $$ on books and personal expenses.</p>
<p>By the way, work study is not a guarantee of money. There is no guarantee that you will be able to find a job and earn all that money. Also, work study is money paid to you, not to the school.</p>
<p>The cost of attendance (which includes estimates for personal expenses and transportation) is $33,000 and your aid (including $15,250 in loans!!!) adds up to $27,750 leaving you with an additional $5,250 in out-of-pocket expenses for the year.</p>
<p>The estimates for personal expenses and transportation are a total of $4,000, so every bit of that will be coming out-of-pocket - you will not receive any sort of disbursement for that.</p>
<p>$60,000+ in loans for an undergrad degree? WAY too much.</p>
<p>College Work-Study Accepted - $2,500.00</p>
<p>Fresh. Academic Grant Accepted- $10,000.00</p>
<h2>loans $15,250.00</h2>
<p>FA = $25,500</p>
<p>coa= $33,000 </p>
<p>Gap/EFC = $7500</p>
<p>You have a few problems here…</p>
<p>What is the breakdown of your loans? Are they student loans and parent plus loans? How much of each? Are your parents responsible for the Plus loans (and have they agreed to that???)</p>
<p>What is supposed to cover the gap of $7500?</p>
<p>Anyway, to answer your question…NO, you won’t get any money for personal expenses and transportation because that is what most of that gap is.</p>
<p>the $5500 gap is covered by state scholarships</p>
<p>What is covering the big loans?</p>
<p>And, why didn’t you list the state scholarships in your listed FA package?</p>
<p>What is your EFC?</p>
<p>I’ll cover the loan once I have a career. In any event, I’ve got this covered, I was just curious about the whole personal expenses thing. Chill out.</p>
<p>Have you notified your school about the outside scholarships? Outside scholarships are treated differently by different schools and in different situations. I *would *go on to explain more, but you said to “chill out,” so I’ll leave it to you to figure out…</p>
<p>I wasn’t asking **how **you would pay back the loans.</p>
<p>I wanted to know what kind of loans those are since students can’t take out that size of loans. It looked like much of that is Parent Plus loans.</p>
<p>And, with the state scholarships, that also presents a different issue.</p>
<p>But, since you said to “chill out,” then figure it all out yourself.</p>
<p>You can probably cover your transportation to school and your fall books from your summer earnings. If you aren’t savings those $$, start now! If you find a W/S job right away and save your W/S $$ for three months you should be able to get home for the holidays and maybe cover your next semester books especially if you can save alittle bit of your summer earnings. Hopefully your transport costs back and forth won’t be too high…</p>
<p>Vicintel, colleges add in travel costs and personal expenses when they’re trying to give you a realistic sense of how much the school year is going to cost you. There are costs above tuition&fees, room&board and books. Travel is one, and personal expenses are generally thought of as everything else – recreational money, shampoo/toothpaste and other toiletries, laundry, clothes, shoes, local transportation (bus, car)… whatever else you might spend money on.</p>
<p>Personal expenses is one area where you can get a little adjustment. If you live very frugally you may spend less, effectively lowering the cost of your year at school by a little.</p>
<p>But, no, they will not be issuing you a check. Those items are just in the budget as money you can expect to spend.</p>
<p>At my son’s school, they list “personal expenses” for exactly the same amount he’s awarded in workstudy. So all his spending money during the school year he earns through his workstudy job, we don’t send him any. Same for my daughter, although her school estimates personal expenses to be higher than her workstudy allowance. In reality she spends much less than the school factors into its cost-of-attendance formula, so she can earn all she needs through workstudy.</p>
<p>My son’s school also has an estimated budget for travel, but we pay travel expenses directly when we buy his plane tickets, the college is not involved – they just list it as one part of total projected expenses (cost-of-attendance) for a year.</p>
<p>A general way to look at your financial aid award is this:</p>
<p>Expenses (with estimated amounts):
tuition & fees
room & board
books
personal expenses
travel</p>
<p>All of these are expenses you’ll have to pay. Where the money comes from to pay for them is not part of this. In fact, full-pay students with no financial aid at all will have exactly the same items and amounts here. Well, the amount for travel might be a little different depending on the distance the student lives from the college… but you get my point –> these are fixed costs for everybody.</p>
<p>On the other side, when you’re receiving financial aid, you have some sources of funds to pay those expenses:
federal and/or state grants
scholarships from the college and/or outside sources
workstudy
student loans
parent (PLUS) loans</p>
<p>(Not everyone will have all of these, it depends on the aid award, on the school’s policies, on the student’s scholarships awarded, and/or their eligibility for federal and state aid.)</p>
<p>Sometimes the amount of funding in the second section will equal the amount they expect you’ll have in total expenses. Sometimes there’s a “gap” – which is still money the student and/or family is required to come up with on top of the amount they’re already expected to pay as their EFC or by means of the loans listed in the aid award.</p>
<p>the above expenses are included as part of the cost of attendance which is the same as the totality of my financial aid award.</p>
<p>Yes, so according to your earlier post:</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>That means that they consider you and/or your family to make an out-of-pocket contribution of about $5000 – apart from the $15250 expected to be paid by loans.</p>
<p>Just getting back to your original question about the travel and personal expenses budgeted amounts, though, you understand how that works now? As part of the cost of attendance (COA), it’s not money awarded you, it’s expenses a typical student might expect to have. All those expense items in the COA are not awards, they are direct costs.</p>
<p>It’s the second catagory (grants, workstudy, loans) that accounts for where the money is coming from to pay the COA.</p>
<p>It’s a very loan-heavy package, which should be something you consider carefully.</p>