Can't file FAFSA till IRS cashes my check?

Paying for College
1

<p>I am a self-employed single parent and didn’t have money to pay my quarterly tax payments until the last few weeks. I heard the stories that if you owe taxes, you can’t use the IRS Retrival tool until your return is processed in May. So I scraped together everything everything I would owe for 2013 plus a little, to be sure I would get a refund and get proccesed quickly, and sent a personal check last week. </p>

<p>I need to fill out the FAFSA - it asks the total amount I have in the bank that day. That $7000 is still there- the IRS hasn’t cashed it yet. The total I have is $7350! So every day I wait to file. You can see my son desperately needs aid to go to college. What should I do?</p>

2

<p>It don’t think it should take much longer.</p>

3

<p>Fafsa has an asset allowance. If your assets are below that amount, your assets aren’t counted against you. The asset allowances are shown in table A5 here:</p>

<p><a href=“http://ifap.ed.gov/efcformulaguide/attachments/091913EFCFormulaGuide1415.pdf[/url]”>http://ifap.ed.gov/efcformulaguide/attachments/091913EFCFormulaGuide1415.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>The asset allowance is low for single parents. But if you are saying your total assets are $7350(savings and investments), if you are 47 or older then it won’t count against you at all. Otherwise, only the amount over your asset allowance would count against you at about 5.6%. </p>

<p>Also, while there is a big fuss made by some about filing fafsa very early, another week or so is not going to make a difference.</p>

4

<p>Ok, that makes sense. I just hate to put down that I own money that actually belongs to the government. There is no checkbox for, “The check is in the mail”.
Thanks a lot … Now I can go to sleep!</p>

5

<p>So I am having the same issue we have 2 small business and our accountant e- filed early in Feb but we did not pay yet assuming we had until April. However after several attempts we could not get our taxes to download using the Retrieval Tool. So, freaking out thinking something was wrong, I decided it might be that we have not paid yet. Neither Fafsa or the IRS could tell me why it wasn’t working. IRS accepted our taxes and said it should work and FAFSA said the same thing…NO it does not work! So from what I am reading now that I have sent my payment, I now have to wait until the payment is processed and then it will work…right? Also is this why we have not received our sons award letters? Do schools now wait until the parents taxes are downloaded before they even consider the awards?</p>

6

<p>How very unusual. The IRS cashes my checks ASAP and everyone I know has reported the same experience. Do check and find out why your checks are being–call the IRS, because every single case I know has had that check turn around very quickly. Much faster than the return could be examined.</p>

7

<p>Even if the money is technically still in your account, if you’ve already written the check, the funds are no longer yours. (Think about it . . . what would happen if you removed that money from the bank before the check hit? Yes, the check would bounce, but you could also be arrested for deliberately writing a bad check!) So I’d deduct the amount from your current balance and include that total on the FAFSA . . . and I wouldn’t give it another thought!</p>

<p>And next time . . . make the payment electronically! ;)</p>