The Fafsa: Increase Your Eligibility For College Student Loans And Grants

By Author: ndxmart
Total Articles: 426
Comment this article

Students who are applying to college will have grants, scholarships, fellowships, and college student loans on their minds. They're going to have to fill out a FAFSA or Free Application for Federal Student Aid. And it turns out that there are ways to fill out a FAFSA that may make a student eligible for more financial aid in the way of grants, scholarships and college student loans. Let's take a look at some tricks to use when filling out the FAFSA. But remember, lying on a FAFSA will get you nowhere - except into trouble.

First of all, before anyone starts moving money around, they should find a calculator online that will tell them their expected family contribution. This will allow you to work with all your strategies to see if it's worth changing things up financially.

FAFSA uses a formula that's weighted to income. It's usually not easy to manipulate your income or your parent's income. The formula really doesn't care about your consumer debt so you're not going to do better if you're heavily burdened by loans or other debt. Using money you have in retirement plans ...
... to pay off debt isn't going to help either. You'll have less money in your retirement plan and FAFSA doesn't take retirement money into account anyway.

When filling out the FAFSA, remember that every $10,000 increase in a family's income reduces financial aid substantially. It reduces it by about $2,000 to $3,000. However, for every extra $10,000 that a family has in assets, they only lose about $250 in aid.

Remember this: If a family's total income is less than $50,000, and the family files their taxes on a simple tax form, any assets they have are simply not considered by the FAFSA.

If a family makes less than $31,000 and they also file their taxes using a simplified form, the expected family contribution will be zero.

This means that if you can manage to live on your savings, and it's possible for you to have control over your income, you can increase your eligibility for federal grants and loans.

Having more than one child in college at a time also increases a student's eligibility for student college loans and grants. If a student takes a year off after high school so as to be in college at the same time as his younger sibling, it will make both students more eligible for aid.

Be honest and be sensible when filling out the FAFSA and you'll be eligible for more college student loans and grants.

For more information about compare student loans please visit: http://tuitionchart.com/