and your letters of recommendation?
will that influence how much aid they give you? like if you have an EFC of 600, but demonstrate financial hardship in essays? or if they see you had an EFC 0 but were involved in an expensive sports yet see that you have no job or other source of income besides federal aid? (is it ok to use grants for this? i imagine it would be since rich students can easily get involved with sports w/o providing a hardship…of course i also use the money for school and to help pay bills and rent)
i know that in need blind schools, the admissions officers wont look at your financial aid documents or anything but how about in reverse?
also, do they do a credit check on you? what info do they get with your SSN? it’s my first time using CSS profile/IDOC so i dont know how secure it is or what they do. do they check bank accounts and stuff?
The admissions office reads your essays…and letters of recommendation…not the financial aid office.
You have to give permission for someone to run a ‘hard’ credit report on you (a soft one can be done for the purpose of extending credit, like a company marketing loans or credit cards).
That isn’t necessarily true. We were audited by one school despite using the IRS data retrieval tool and they asked for copies of bank statements, stock statements, etc. This school ended up giving my D their biggest scholarship (yay!). Tell the truth.
Are you the student or the parent?
@redpoodles did you report that you had stocks and stuff like that or do they ask for everything if you haven’t reported any of such things or don’t have any? did they audit you despite using IDOC/CSS, or were you just using fafsa? cuz on IDOC they have you scan all of the tax statements and W-2’s. jesus i can’t imagine they asked for bank statements too, that seems so intrusive. it’s frustrating because on fafsa we already used the IRS data retrieval so you’d think they’d already have reports of that. congratulations though!
@TomSrOfBoston student.
Not necessarily true that ONLY the admissions office does. That’s definitely the usual, but I know for a fact that the financial aid office at my school read my application packet. That was kind of a ‘special’ circumstance though because I had alumni and faculty at the school advocating for a bigger scholarship package, though, so…
But just saying, at schools that aren’t need blind, there’s nothing preventing fin aid from accessing that data.
In previous threads you mentioned investing in stocks. Are you still doing that? Have you earned dividends? If so, I think you have to report them.
@austinmshauri what if we didn’t buy stocks til after submitting FAFSA (so 0 on FAFSA) but now for CSS PROFILE we have to report them, will that lead to inconsistencies? do i leave FAFSA as is or do i have to update that too?
do we report just the dividends? it’s like 20 dollars. i dont even know if it will be enough to be reported on taxes since i think there’s a minimum threshold for that too since im still a dependent and they treat it differently i think
This was a CSS Profile school and we reported everything we had on both the FAFSA and the CSS Profile. They had our taxes, the IRS data retrieval, and everything requested on IDOC.
It was seriously like being audited. We did have an inconsistent income from year to year, so maybe that was a flag, I don’t know.
I just recommend everyone keep a good file so you can pull these things out easily instead of spending half a day tracking down everything they ask for.
The FAFSA is a snapshot of your finances as of the day you file, so I wouldn’t change that. When you fill out the profile, answer the questions based on what your situation is on that day. If it asks if you have assets and you own stocks, answer yes. It will probably ask for their value, so you should be able to enter that too.
I understand filing forms and verification may seem intrusive, but you’re asking for someone else’s money. Some families won’t report stocks and other assets if they think they won’t get caught, so now colleges check everything.
Folks…if you are filing a fafsa or Profile for 2017-2018, you would be reporting the dividends you earned in 2015…because those would be reported on the 2015 taxes.
If you bought stocks today…in 2017…and you will earn dividends in 2017, those will be on your 2017 taxes which will be used for the 2019-2020 financial aid forms.
@thumper1 so i dont report dividends and stocks because FAFSA and CSS are using the 2015 taxes?
@austinmshauri that makes sense, i hadn’t really thought of it that way. do i report the value at which i bought them at or current price? it changes everyday… what if it goes down a lot by then… ?