ethanrt

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.

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.

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.

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.