My friend’s son will be attending college next year and has an inquiry about her family’s finances.
My friend is a stay-at-home mom. Her husband provides a significant portion of his income (a little more than half of his monthly income) to his own parents and siblings in another country. For FAFSA purposes, it appears that they won’t be counted as dependents because they aren’t under the same household.
If this is relevant to financial aid calculations, to have accurate calculations, is she able to report this piece of information to colleges somehow? Because her husband’s family members are not in the USA, should she report this to colleges? If so, how?
They won’t be considered dependents. While it’s a nice thing to do, colleges will consider supporting extended family members a choice. How families spend their money is up to them, but it’s perfectly reasonable for colleges to expect the parents to be first in line to cover college costs. Otherwise, they end up subsidizing families in foreign countries when they could be subsidizing American students.
The colleges will not care. Giving money to people outside the household is a choice.
A college will not give a student more money for that reason. A college has no interest in essentially supporting someone’s relatives that live elsewhere.
The family has some choices to make…
- Continue providing over half of the income (crazy unless the family income is extremely high) to people outside the household, and then their children will have to either use their stats to get huge merit scholarships or commute to their local publics.
- Cut back on what they give their relatives so that they can pay for college.
- The mom can go to work and she can use her income to pay for college. (after all, are they really expecting a college to give them more money so that the family can still send a large amount of money overseas and have a wife that doesn't work? )
Since the extended family members have likely become used to being supported, and therefore the dad likely will not cut back payments, and the mom may not want to go to work, then I guess the family needs to choose Door Number Two. Show them the threads here on CC that list schools that give free tuition or more for high stats.
What is their approx income? How much will they spend on college per year?
While very nice…the parent decision to support other family members elsewhere…is a choice, and colleges will view it that way. The family could make the choice to use the same money to fund college costs.
The college’s won’t care about this at all. there is no place to report this at all on the fafsa. On the Profile, I suppose you could put it in the “other information” section…but it really won’t matter in terms of the financial aid calculations…at all.
There are many families here who send money to relatives in other countries (or even to grandparents or whatever here).
This is a choice…and that is how colleges view it.
This is how colleges will view this…
If they made allowances for these things, then suddenly EVERYONE would be “sending money” to relatives while asking for aid. Can you imagine how crazy and fraudulent that could become?
Imagine…I could, theoretically, send over half my income to some relatives while my kids are in college and tell my relatives to buy a home with it or put it in savings. Then after my kids are out of school, voila! The relatives would give me back my money or give me the deed to the home.
It doesn’t matter that your friends’ relatives “need” the help. The school really has no way to prove that, nor do they have an interest in doing so. EVERYONE has relatives that “need help”. Colleges giving aid in such cases would mean everyone would send money to needy relatives.