<p>Re: the multiple child issue and planning ahead. If I’d known 20+ years ago that having kids 4 yrs apart meant I’d be paying tuition for 8 years with no “break” for having 2 in college simultaneously (and that they’d graduate HS and college in different cities on the very same morning), my H and I might have made some different choices. </p>
<p>In actuality, the spacing was due to miscarriages, not planning, but it wouldn’t have been as relevant…</p>
<p>*** crossposted with watermark</p>
<p>Go ahead, make my day, jym626</p>
<p>So here we thought we were being all smart by spacing our kids four years apart. </p>
<p>How about if the older one is in med school and the younger one is undergrad? Does that count as overlap?</p>
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Finally something will cut your way. 
Yes. At those schools that consider parental assets in awarding institutional aid or institutionally-administered aid (both merit and need) in the form of lower interest loans and outright grants, the overlap counts. Ta-dah!</p>
<p>High Fives all around - now I’m starting to love the system</p>
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??? ya lost me. Are we now channeling Clint Eastwood?</p>
<p>We were hoping grad school would be paid for by teaching assistantships or an employer of s’s (is that an entitlement?) but so far older s isn’t choosing grad school, so dont get to enjoy that benefit. Had to (no, chose to) pay for younger s’s private school while older s was in college. That didnt count as 2 in school. Boo.</p>
<p>One thing I am happy about that my D has chosen to go cheaply to UG, saved whole ton of $$ for us, and that is one of the reasons why we told her not to be concerned with tuition for Grad. School, we will support her thru that. We have not paid tuition, she is on Merit $$ (no chance for need based, not even close) and some of her living expenses have been also covered by Merit $$. She worked so hard, got awesome GPA and state schools really appreciate it. They want good students and know how to get them. We did not ever considered Ivy’s or any other elite, or any school that offer only need based.</p>
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<p>I have a few, but nothing I can print here. Yum, appletinis and poptarts, now we’re talking!</p>
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<p>Fire fighting is physically demanding, dangerous work. Fire fighters retire early because the work is so physically demanding they just can’t do it much past their 50s. This is the second time you have misrepresented something. The first was when you pointed out that teachers get six weeks off at the end of every summer. You didn’t mention that they consistently work fifty hour weeks the rest of the year, including evenings and weekends.</p>
<p>I don’t get it. You left teaching because it wasn’t lucrative enough. Now you’re wishing you had gone into an “easier” profession like fire fighting. But you were there. You were working in what you view as an “easy” profession and you left. You could have just stayed being a teacher and gotten your lucrative financial aid from Harvard. But you didn’t, I don’t get it.</p>
<p>Are you sorry you left teaching? Is that where all this anger is coming from?</p>
<p>Pizzagirl, I have never written anything about what families “should have saved” or whether they were “deserving.” There may have been someone else posting that. Nor am I saying that we figured out any costs of supporting elderly relatives, nor that we kept balance sheets, even mentally, on anyone. I am saying that we knew a good deal more about our neighbors, back then, in that setting, than we do now. There was nothing intrusive about it. People shared information.</p>
<p>(For the record, I think the issue of supporting elderly relatives and its impact on financial circumstances was raised in post #361, not by me.)</p>
<p>Now I can only recognize one family in five who are our neighbors on our cul de sac. The privacy values are excellent. The neighborliness, not so much. I have no idea what anyone is paying for college anywhere, other than the people in our family. So we fit the preferred pattern, apparently. </p>
<p>Pizzagirl, you clearly came from a different background. Perhaps someone has made unwarranted inferences about your circumstances. I’m sorry. But in our context, there was absolutely nothing wrong with what my family did. It was the common cultural practice, and in many ways, it was actually rather nice. I do miss it.</p>
<p>I don’t know the current FA algorithms, nor specifically how savings affect them (items 3a and 3b above). However, it seems to me that an algorithm that essentially equates families based on current income alone is almost certain to be unfair–financial history matters. I recognize that colleges have to deal with the current financial situations of families (including savings) when the students apply. I also understand not wanting to exclude a student whose parents “might” have saved more, but didn’t. For that matter, in our current circumstance, we probably count as “profligate.”</p>
<p>jym626- CSS stands for Culinary Services Support. They provide the cheese to go with the wine. ;)</p>
<p>Anagram–good move. We need some cheese to go with all this whine. ;)</p>
<p>Great acronym, anagrampanda! But on this thread, I think you mean whine, not wine :)</p>
<p>? Don’t know if people think I was whining. But if so, let me know and I will whine better.</p>
<p>LOL-- crossposted with mommusic. And quantmech-- the whining was pages back-- not you. Sorry to confuse.</p>
<p>Wine??? Did someone mention wine?? And cheese?? Oh shucks…it was WHINE…well…maybe it was just spelled wrong!!</p>
<p>You are SO far behind Thumper. We’ve already had mimosas for breakfast and appletinis for lunch! :)</p>
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<p>And here I wandered into this thread thinking it was actually about the pros and cons of the current FA model employed by elite colleges but in actuality it was a “Hot Diggity - We’re in the Money!” thread by those advantaged by the current FA model.</p>
<p>My bad.</p>
<p>I will just go on paying my share of taxes plus full freight and have the warm feeling in the pit of my stomach that deserving children of such SELFLESS parents are benfiting from my and my husbands toils.</p>
<p>Cheers!</p>
<p>cheers to you too, sewhappy. Pour yourself a glass of wine.</p>
<p>Sewhappy-
I think you are agreeing with Thumper, that there seems, possibly, to be a spelling mix-up. Maybe the example you posted there indicates that for some, there may be some confusion between “need” and “greed”?? ;)</p>
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<p>It has been said before in this thread, but I guess it needs repeating. Even your child is subsidized by Harvard. It is costing them more than what you are paying to educate him. Therefore, you are not giving anybody any benefit from all your toils. </p>
<p>Hmm, seems you are benefitting from the toils of the Harvard endowment.</p>