Hi! I don’t know much about FAFSA or CSS except that I will need to submit them to the schools that my son applied to. When do we start this? Right away or after filing 2014 taxes? It looks like some schools want the financial aid paperwork in by February 1st, which I find somewhat absurd. I doubt I’ll even receive all the documents by then, much less have my taxes completed. But of course I’ll try!
What are the first steps? Sign up for FAFSA? For CSS do I just go on College Board and put in the schools’ codes? (We did a preliminary CSS for U of Miami a few weeks ago, though I’m not sure what the point was, haven’t heard anything back from them.)
Any tips would be greatly appreciated, I’m not sure where to start.
Thanks and Happy New Years! 
Happy New Year!
I’d recommend during FAFSA now using estimates (probably based on last year’s tax information). Try to get your taxes done as soon as you can and then go back and amend the FAFSA to include the real numbers.
[URL=<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/financial-aid-scholarships/1723724-first-time-fafsa-filers-get-your-pin-and-a-warning-p1.html%5DHere%5B/url”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/financial-aid-scholarships/1723724-first-time-fafsa-filers-get-your-pin-and-a-warning-p1.html]Here[/url] is some good information about how to get started with the FAFSA (getting a PIN and filling it out).
You can use the 2013 taxes as a guide…but please do adjust your income and tax numbers up…if your income increased. Look at your last pay stub of the year. Much of this info is on it under “year to date”.
You want your estimates to be as close as possible. Remember to use a “will file status”.
ASAP after February 1, get your taxes done. Then amend your FAFSA to reflect the 2014 actual tax numbers. Change filing status to “taxes completed” and resubmit. Link to the IRS data retrieval tool.
Ok thanks! I applied for a PIN yesterday, so we should be able to start soon.
Some schools want PROFILE long before FAFSA, so it is critical that you do not miss priority deadlines.
For instance, early decision applicants for Rice, needed to finish CSS by November 14, 2014.
We only had one school that required PROFILE and it was due by November 1. My husband did get the FAFSA done today and I am grateful he did that.
U of Miami wanted the CSS done by Nov. 15 I believe and we did that, using tax info from 2013. I’m going to try to start FAFSA as soon as we get the PIN and I’ll update CSS once we have 2014 tax info. I think all the schools he’s applied to will be ok with that timeline. We applied to way too many schools, and keeping track of them all is a huge hassle. That’s one good reason not to apply to 14 schools! But we felt we had to put out a bunch of apps to try to get one or two good merit offers.