<p>Stafford loans each year are an assumption for the students at my house, no matter what our EFC might be. (Only exception is if they accept full rides.) Total loans will be $19K by graduation, plus summer/term-time earnings, which is not an unreasonable amount of skin in the game considering the amount we may be contributing to this enterprise.</p>
<p>Ethanrt, $35k in total investments held in your parents' names should be covered under the asset protection allowance (which is around $46,000 for married parents), and at any rate, amounts above that are assessed at 5%. If those funds are in YOUR name, that's an entirely different story. Home equity might be the missing piece of the puzzle here.</p>
<p>Yale's new FA policy has certainly made a difference. They were tied at the top of the pack for us. Amherst did a pretty good job. It has done the best of the LACs for us.</p>
<p>Editing to add, if a kid can avoid loans I'm all for it especially if they plan to go on to graduate school.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Moral of the story (and this should be posted somewhere): If you have investments and loans, and are applying to college, use up all of the investments paying loans by the end of the summer before you start applying.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Usually that would be the financially smartest thing to do anyway, whether or not a child is applying to college.</p>
<p>I just wanted to jump in here and say that I'm not sure that you can reach any kind of conclusion about which schools give 'disappointing aid offers'. From what I've been reading on lots of threads, the same school that gives a huge amount of aid to one student can gap the next student considerably. Unless you can really do an in-depth financial analysis, and also take into account what skills the kids have that the college might want, it really seems to be kind of random. I'm sure that there is method, but I'm not sure <em>I</em> could figure it out.</p>
<p>For example, I was talking to a parent the other night. My daughter and her daughter both were accepted to the same college. Her daughter was considering it a top pick because they were so generous with aid. My daughter has ruled it out because the aid was so poor. The school sent me a lovely letter saying that yes, they had gapped us, they couldn't do anything more, so sorry. My daughter has a higher class rank and higher test scores than the other girl, and they both have lots of EC's. But obviously there is <em>something</em> that the other girl has that my daughter does not. Or maybe it just has to do with our different financial circumstances. We both will have three children in college next year. They actually make more money than we do, but I don't know details.</p>
<p>So, if you asked me about the school, I'd say the aid package was a disappointment and that we were gapped. If you ask the other family, they would say the aid package was excellent and they were very happy with it. This school was not on tokenadults list of schools that promised to meet need.</p>
<p>Let me clarify something briefly for those who are confused. Tokenadult, you may want to read as well - although I'm sure you don't need it since you have proved to yourself time and again that you are clearly the wisest and most knowledgeable poster on CC.</p>
<p>Numbers here are very approximate in this situation, but the general idea holds and applies to my family's (and, I'm sure, others') mortgage-investment situation.
Average stock market returns per year for investments held over ten years: $2,500 and rising.
Interest payments per year: $1,500 and falling.</p>
<p>Would /you/ want to pay off part of the mortgage using the investment money?</p>
<p>As a parent and an adult, I am constantly amazed at how confident high school students are of their family's financial situation (and how colleges interpret the same). If you live in an affluent new england town and your family owns a business and a home and has investments, then you have advantages that most colleges students probably do not have. Whether the family choses to use those financial advantages for one child's college costs is irrelevant to the colleges' financial aid office. Every bit of aid offered is a gift; no one is entitled to a top tier college education. Perhaps one could be less disappointed, and more appreciative of the free money one has been offered.</p>
<p>Thanks for the further replies. It does look like there are a lot of new ideas to consider when pondering how various family financial situations fit into America's non-system of college aid.</p>
<p>my parents 18 years ago played with the numbers to decide whether to pay down their mortgage or do a college savings thing. They did the college monthly savings for about a year or so for the full amount they could, lost alot(bad timing) of the money. Switched to paying down/changing from a 30 year mortgage toa 15. They said they finished paying the 15 year 3 years early.Three years of saving the mortgage payment, now have that mortgage payment money sitting in the bank plus have that monthly money of income to more than meet our EFC. They said it was a gamble but losing so much during the 90's of tht 529 or not much return made them rethink. They said they are so glad they did not do what many of their friends did using their house to finance their lifestyle, they have 4 kids and all of us will be able to go to where ever we get into with no money worries.</p>
<p>Archiemom: I guess I'd just have to say that, unless my parents are lying to me, then yes, I'm fairly confident. It helps that I also filled out nearly all of the finaid forms involved in the application process (though no tax returns besides my own, obviously), so I had/have access to nearly all the same information that my parents did/do.</p>
<p>I also feel that too many of this forum's "adults" (I put that in quotes not to be demeaning, but as a reminder that we should all be skeptical of fellow forum-goers, especially those claiming a certain supposed superiority/etc.) make a few too many assumptions about everything that supposedly comes with that standing.</p>
<p>And while I understand the whole "affluent CT town" thing, I think you're falling into the trap that I was talking about earlier, which leads some colleges to give terrible finaid estimates: that of appearances versus means. If it's a choice between using investments to pay for college instead of holding them to pay loan/mortgage in a few years, or a choice between keeping the business (and therefore any hope of someday viably making a decent amount of money; business are sort of long-term commitments, if you will) and selling it to use its value for college... well, the "financial advantages" of the whole situation start to seem a bit less distinct, and those are choices that colleges which claim to "meet 100% of need" should not ask a family to make.</p>
<p>Obviously there are people around who have it much, much worse than me; that's utterly undeniable. One just gets frustrated when a college financial aid office doesn't take into account any of what I would call the fairly obvious financial factors I discussed in the preceding paragraph.</p>
<p>Well, my point would be that there's no "trap" involved. Why do you think there's a difference between appearances and means? My household is also supported, primarily, by a small business. But we have no illusions regarding its impact on college funding. We'll use it when and if our kid needs it. I do not expect others to pay for our child's college education because of the choices we've made over the past 30 years.</p>
<p>The obvious financial factors that I see are that small business assets are available for college financing. "Need" in this case is such a fluid concept. Parents who own businesses are much less "in need" than many parents with average-paying jobs. It appears that a family like this has need (perhaps because of cash flow issues related to irregular paychecks), but in reality they have options that most families do not have.</p>
<p>Again, you're making an assumption: that you could sell your business and immediately get a decent job. From what you've said, I'm assuming you or someone in your family could. But for the sake of argument, say that's not true. Say that all you had was a 25-year-old degree in computer science; the family's in trouble if you ditch the business and hope to make a decent wage with that. Not to mention the fact that as soon as you sold the business, college grant offers would plummet, thus partially nullifying that move :-p</p>
<p>Also, there's this: "I do not expect others to pay for our child's college education because of the choices we've made over the past 30 years."
Following that logic, we might as well just do away with the concept of college aid altogether and make kids pay for their parents choices in the college arena - to an even higher degree than they do now. Thankfully, many colleges today see beyond that dubious plan.</p>
<p>Northeastern gave me at 17k scholarship+grants package, not bad, but not good. That still leaves me more than 30k short.
Georgetown gave me 2k. Wow, thanks! Where do you think I'll get 53k a year?
Tufts gave... nothing! My father makes less than 100k a year after taxes, for my family of 6 to live on, and they think I'm not qualified for any aid at all to pay their 50k+ bill?</p>
<p>Actually, the ONLY good offer was Harvard. My parents have to come up with about 16k a year, which is at least doable. If I hadn't been accepted there, I'd be going to U of Edinburgh or St Andrews, in Scotland. Not qualified for aid, since I'm American, but still far cheaper than anything I'd been offered!</p>
<p>From my own experience and what I have noticed from here, it seems that colleages make their financial aid decisions not based on the families' needs but on their desire to accept a student. Need-blind is not true. Can anyone confirm this impression based on your own experience?</p>
<p>Bucknell was very disappointing, especially after having been offered sizable grants in addition to merit scholarships from 4 other schools. They gave me a $10k merit scholarship, but being the 3rd most expensive school in the country, that didn't to much to soften the additional $40,000 my single parent family is going to have to find.</p>
<p>I also have a very special situation: my father is in the end stages of a terminal illness and has not been able to work for the past 8 years (he was the sole provider for our family of 4) and my parents have been going through a complicated divorce for the past 3 years. My dad and his family refuse to pay any part of my college education (or my brother's $15k private school tuition) and because the divorce in ongoing, whatever money we had is in a trust that can't be divided until the it's been finalized (there is currently no end in sight). My mom also just got laid off, and there's about $50k of liquid money in our accounts right now.</p>
<p>So yeah. I'm going to appeal my award this Thursday at Bucknell. Hopefully they come back with a more generous offer...</p>
<p>i got a disappointing aid reward at bucknell too. no merit money and only 7000 in aid. i'm planning on going into a ridiculous amount of debt and i had no idea they were the third most expensive school in the country. oh crap.</p>
<p>Northeastern is known for low finaid packages. From what I have read and heard their rationale for this is that students earn money during their coop experiences and therefore have more available towards college expenses.</p>