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The new Simplified FAFSA is here! Here’s a quick video with some tips that will help you get through it with a minimum of chaos and maximum of financial aid. 🔗
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About that Facebook Live Event…
My apologies to anyone who tried to access my event on Facebook yesterday. The short story is, the stream went to the wrong place and when you’re in the middle of a live interview there isn’t much you can do to change that!
Common App and Coalition App Essay Prompts
Does your student have some free time on their hands? If so, now could be a great time to start working on college essays. The Common App and Coalition App release their essay prompts well ahead of time– January for the Common App, for example.
CARES Act College Funding: Cash for Students
Following up on yesterday’s post. How does a student get cash from his school’s emergency student aid grant under the CARES Act? It depends on the school, and most have not formalized their policies yet.
College Students and Stimulus Payments
Parents of college students have likely heard that those students– if claimed as dependents on their parents’ 2019 taxes– are not eligible for the $1,200 stimulus payment.
What Can You Learn From a Crisis?
You know the saying, “Experience is what you get when you don’t get what you want?” 2020 is setting itself up to be a year full of experience.
What Now? What’s Next?
If you have college students like mine, you’re probably figuring out how to move them home. If they’re seniors, they’re probably wondering about whether they’ll have graduation, how they’ll get job interviews, even how they could get started on a career.
Dept of Ed Guidance on Academic Interruptions due to Coronavirus
The Department of Education released guidance on 5 potential scenarios for academic interruptions due to the coronavirus and their impacts on Title IV financial aid:
Free Money: AOTC Claiming Strategies
Once upon a time, the American Opportunity Tax Credit was a pretty simple proposition: Families could get a $2,500 annual tax credit for $4,000 of out-of-pocket college tuition expenses for their dependent student, as long as their income was below the IRS threshold for the credit.
What do I do with Form 1098-T?
Form 1098-T is a tuition statement that colleges and universities are required to provide. The 1098-T shows “payments received for qualified tuition and related expenses” and scholarships received, provided they either came from the college or were disbursed directly to the college.
Want to make big $$ this summer?
The Census is hiring and in the current low-unemployment job market, the Census Bureau has increased wages in the hopes of attracting enough workers.
What Did We Learn in College?
A few timely observations from my personal experience with college for you and your student to consider.
Technically, you can use student loans to pay for any qualified education expense. Practically speaking, because of how they work it tends to be a little more limited.