<p>On my financial aid letter brochure, it talks about a travel allowance. Can someone just elaborate on what this is? The brochure just said it's to travel back home... Just elaborate... Tks...</p>
<p>Call them?</p>
<p>Yeah, I plan to call them tomorrow, but I was just wondering…</p>
<p>Travel allowance as I understand it—the amount the financial aid office “determines” you will most likely spend on having you go home for the holidays. They incorporate that amount in determining the level of financial aid/loans to offer you. In our case–the amount covered travel to school at the beginning and end of the year, and Christmas/Winter break. It did not include Thanksgiving or Spring Break. Plan accordingly. APOL-a mom</p>
<p>So, you shouldn’t have to pay an extra amount for travel, then right? It’s like a budget? So when you need to travel, you already have that amount budgeted?</p>
<p>If I understand your question correctly…if you are just planning 2 round trips home, then the “budget line item called travel allowance” should cover the monies you will spend. I found the cheapest airfare, divided that by the allowance amount and determined that is what they used to project our “expenses for attendance”. In our case we actually needed to plan to spend more $ because of Thanksgiving & Spring Break required 2 additional trips.
The financial aid package did not give us a check for these expenditures, we had to budget that from our own funds. I do think it increased the grants our DD was able to receive, however.
APOL-a mom</p>