<p>Denlah, in that you have a second shot at it , if you get accepted somewhere that you love but the aid is based on your step dad’s income and assets, and they won’t budge, use that. You can look at what the the array of costs are. It’s really surprising how much variance there is even in like schools that assert they use the same methodology. II agree that transferring your money into a 529 in your name is a good idea as some schools do hit up student assets even more than the FAFSA 20%, and will track those assets for the entire time the student is in college, assumeing a given amount of that initial amount.</p>