My older daughter started grad school last fall and received a nice graduate teaching assistantship plus tuition waiver for most of her tuition. This was for fall semester 2015, and during spring of 2015 she was a senior undergrad and we were paying, she would not be ‘self sustaining’ by any stretch. I’m still paying her rent and she pays utilities, supplies and books, food, etc plus food for a very large cat (where’s FAFSA…) She made under $1k a month for fall semester. Her mom and I file married, both well employed and well taxed.
So, how do we file? she’s 23 and has one year of the HOPE credit left, so it would be beneficial she files as a ‘dependent’ since we paid for most of the year. She has tax withheld from her paycheck.
If she files alone, she can get some refund but can she claim the HOPE credit?
Can she file in our tax form (family tax form ) ???
You include her as dependent, she files her own return without including herself as dependent and gets her withheld taxes back (see the other thread on son’s tax form question)
The parents qualify to claim the student as a dependent, then:
The student must select the option for “I can be claimed on someone else’s return”, on the student’s tax return. The student must select this option even f the parent’s qualify to claim the student as a dependent, and the parents do not claim them.
You might already know this, but when Grad students file the FAFSA it doesn’t take the parents information, the student’s EFC is 00000 and they’re eligible for loans up to a certain amount. It’s wonderful that she got the assistantship, with the tuition waiver and a small stipend, but she has to request the FAFSA money herself.
The FAFSA is for the younger daughter hence the need to do taxes early. Somehow several graduate schools requested FAFSA from my older daughter, which she filled out but not quite correctly at first (22 years old with 3 dependents ). A few schools were quite adamant in requesting FAFSA for grad school ‘to be considered for aid’. Oh well.
) ???