does parents claming me as dependent affect my aid?

Paying for College
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<p>My mom claimed me as a dependent through all my years at college. I’ve realized that she probably should not have done this seeing as I did not live at home nor did she pay for my expenses. She gave me her old car and I was on her health insurance through her employer. Other than that, I paid for all of my own expenses over those years.</p>

<p>I’m wondering if her claiming me as a dependent affected my financial aid which in turn affected the amount of student loans I had to take out.</p>

<p>Secondly, is there anything I can do about it now? After the fact?</p>

<p>I appreciate any help or advice on the matter…</p>

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<p>Being claimed as a dependent on a parent’s taxes has nothing to do with financial aid. With some other exceptions that likely don’t apply, you are dependent for finaid until you are 24 regardless of being or not being claimed as a dependent on taxes.</p>

<p>Medical insurance is expensive. Scholarships/grants you may have received don’t count as support you provided yourself. It’s not possible for us to say whether your Mom could legally claim you as a dependent, but it didn’t affect your aid.</p>

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<p>I agree with Annoyed Dad. Also, even if it did affect your aid, there would be nothing that one can do now. YOu don’t get additional aid that you missed out on retroactively, though you do have to repay any money you might have gotten erroneously.</p>

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<p>annoyingdad, what are the exemptions that are unlikely?</p>

<p>She did not pay for anything of mine after I was 18 and moved out of her house. The health insurance was through her employer and I was covered simply because I was a college student. That wasn’t out of her pocket.</p>

<p>I’m not understanding why I was considered a dependent until I was 24. I no longer lived under her roof nor had her pay any of my expenses.</p>

<p>If I was living independently then why were my mom’s tax documents required when I applied for financial aid?</p>

<p>This surely would have made a difference in my financial aid if they were to use my income as a benchmark for the amount of financial aid I would receive wouldn’t it?</p>

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<p>See page 3 at this link:</p>

<p><a href=“http://ifap.ed.gov/efcformulaguide/attachments/091312EFCFormulaGuide1314.pdf[/url]”>http://ifap.ed.gov/efcformulaguide/attachments/091312EFCFormulaGuide1314.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>The birth date item is to determine if the student is over 23. Living independently and supporting yourself isn’t enough to qualify as independent for finaid.</p>

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<p>Collegeguy, for FA purposes if you are under 24 you are a dependent unless you are vet, married, or have a dependent of your own. Tax dependency and amount of support from your mother do not enter into the equation.</p>

<p>Those are the rules for everyone.</p>

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<p>

No, it wouldn’t have made any difference to financial aid if she had not claimed you as a dependent for taxes. Dependent for financial aid and dependent for taxes are 2 completely different things with different rules.</p>

<p>For financial aid (both FAFSA and most, if not all, private school FA forms) you are a dependent unless you are 24 years old or meet one of the other “independence” criteria (be a veteran, married etc). Supporting yourself and claiming yourself on your taxes does not make you independent for FA purposes. (my son went back to school at 22 after working full time, supporting himself, living on his own, and claiming his own exemption for taxes for 2-3 years - he was still a dependent for FA purposes and had to report parent income and assets).</p>

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<p>Again, Annoyingdad is correct. You may have been independent for tax purposes, but unless you were age 24, married, had a dependent of your own, were a veteran of the armed forces, or were removed from your parents by court order before you were 18, you are not considered Independent for college financial aid purposes. Otherwise a lot of parents would just gift their kids money and those kids could be considered independent for aid purpose in about a year. The parents are the college’s cash cows. 18-24 year olds rarely have enough money to pay for college or have the credit history for loans to pay for college. The colleges target the parents for the same reasons robbers target banks; that’s where the money is. </p>

<p>Your mother’s tax records were required because that is how financial aid is structured. For those who do not meet independence requirements, the parent with whom you spent the most time with is the one considered the custodial parent. IF you have two parents and spent the same or no time with either, you were supposed to submit the info of the one with the most resources so that you qualify for less aid. </p>

<p>There are kids who are stuck in no where land because not only would there parents not pay for anything, they would not turn over their financial records or tax info. There is no law saying you HAVE to do this. There is the assumption that a parent will, and if the parent chooses not to do so, the kid’s options dwindle further.</p>

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<p>Collegeguy, even if this were the case, the government is NOT going to give retroactive aid, nor is the college. There are kids who filled out fin aid wrong, or mistakes were made, and they did not get a dime back. Once the fiscal year is done, you don’t get any more money for that year. Now if there is a mistake giving you more than you were entitled to get, you do owe that back to the government but not the other way around. So you are not going to get anything even if for all of that time, it would have been possible to keep your mother out of the picture. It’s not going to happen, that your fin aid is going to be recalculated and you get more for earlier years.</p>

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<p>If you lived with your mother, and she supported you until you turned 18, then you were her dependent. If you had health insurance through her employer, that may well have meant money out of her pocket, unless you were paying the premiums.</p>

<p>These rules were put in place to prevent students from taking a year off before college just so they could claim independence for financial aid purposes. Independence to tax purposes is an entirely different story. Even if you could claim your own exemption on your taxes, you would still need her taxes for FAFSA.</p>

<p>As for the taxes, I’m assuming you were a full time student. Was her home your home of record with your school? If you supported yourself with student loans, and the value of those loans was more than all other costs (including your share of the cost of health insurance provided by her employer), you might qualify to claim own exemption, in which case you would both need to amend your tax returns for those years (can still be done to claim a refund for 2009 only until April 15, you can’t get additional refund for 2008 or earlier). Did you get all the loans without having her cosign?</p>

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<p>

You should be claiming your own exemption on your tax returns. However, as a dependent student, you still need her tax information for Federal financial aid.

I afraid not.

See <a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/financial-aid-scholarships/629955-should-i-get-married-independent-student-status.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/financial-aid-scholarships/629955-should-i-get-married-independent-student-status.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

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<p>Aha…</p>

<p>Thank you everyone for clarifying that for me. I was so confused because I thought “dependent” meant the same thing for taxes and FA.</p>

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<p>Parents and probably more so the federal government are the cash cows for colleges. The majority of the money that paid for my education was from either financial aid or federal student loans. My mom did take out a parent plus loan but only for my last semester. Which I regret even more now because I agreed to pay those back myself and I can’t simply apply for income based repayment like the loans under my own name.</p>

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<p>Yes, aside from the one parent plus loan all the loans were under my name only.</p>

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So you are complaining in one breath that the federal gov’t helped you and in the next that you aren’t able to file for income based repayment?</p>

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So you are done with school?</p>

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<p>Well, when you put it that way you’re making me sound like an idiot.</p>

<p>When I was 18-22 I was naive and I was expected to go to college like all the other girls and boys. So I did. I did what ever was standard for college students to do: apply for financial aid, apply for scholarships and whatever was left over you’d take out loans for. I was able to take money from the federal government. So I did just that. I thought college was something I needed to do and this was the easiest way to make that happen.</p>

<p>College costs are higher because of the mere fact that the federal government pays so much of students’ tuition. Look at the sky rocketing tuition costs. It mirrors the sky rocketing healthcare costs. It is a symptom of the federal government getting involved in sectors it has no business being involved in.</p>

<p>The federal government should not have their hand in paying for student’s tuition. It’s ridiculous to me. Especially when undergraduate degrees are a joke anyway. Any job that actually requires knowledge obtained from a degree usually comes from a post graduate degree anyway.</p>

<p>My complaint is that I never should have gone to college. I couldn’t afford it and it was not something I needed. Of course I made the decision to go and I hold myself responsible for that. I’m just saying that the federal government being involved made it a much easier decision for me to go.</p>

<p>I’d compare it to the sub prime loans the banks were giving out during the housing bubble. Those people should not have been given those loans if it didn’t look like they could pay for it. We all saw where that mess got us.</p>

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<p>Yes, I have been for years now. I was just curious what effect my mom claiming me as a dependent all those years she shouldn’t have been had on my own finances.</p>

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<p>Dear College Guy: “Dearly beloved we are gathered here today”. I’m not sure but I think getting married is a loophole to the age 24 rule.</p>

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<p>Please see above post ^^</p>

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<p>College guy…I’m not sure what you are complaining about. It was YOUR choice to take out loans. No one tied you to a tree and forced you to do so. You could have dropped out of college at ANY time, and gotten a job to support yourself.</p>

<p>The notion that the federal government is paying tons of college costs is poppycock. First of all, only low income students can receive grant money from the federal government. A $5500 Pell grant will pay for tuition at some community colleges for the year…but not elsewhere. Federally funded loans need to be repaid, and cannot even be discharged in bankruptcy.</p>

<p>Thank goodness these loans and grants are available. For some students, it is the difference between attending any college…or not.</p>

<p>If YOU really didn’t want to be in college, then you should have dropped out and gotten a job to support yourself.</p>

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<p>Collegeguys, I agree with some of what you say. But in many cases the parents also pay. The government only lends out $5500, to a freshman for college loans, with a few schools that have Perkins funds that can offer up another $5500 more in subsidized loans, but that is rare. If a parent gets turned down for a PLUS (Direct Parent Loan), the student can take out $4K or so more in Staffords. But any other loans are made to the parents, not the students. Yes, it’s called a cosign, but it’s really the parents they are snagging with those private loans. And the PLUS program is for parents only.</p>

<p>You may feel that college was a waste of time, but if you got a degree out of it, you may find some use for it later. A lot worse ways to have spent those years when you were a young adult. If you read through these forums, there is no way one can convince most kids that they should not go right away to college, and not even to restrict choices to affordable schools but they feel that they are entitled to go to sleep away colleges with all the costs associated with them. The financial aid system is not set up to pay for that, but parents and kids borrow, sometimes, over the top, to get what is perceived as a right and rite of passage.</p>

<p>I do assure you, however, that there are jobs out there that do require college degrees and often when they do not, if those applying and in that field tend to have degrees, it is a detriment not to have one. Having a degree is no guarantee of getting anything, however. My one son is talking like your are now. At some level, I do agree with some of what he says, but overall, I am glad he got his degree, whether it makes a difference in his life or not. </p>

<p>As for college loans, I agree fully that there are some heavy issues looming out there about them. Yes, there are a lot of people in trouble from taking out loans they cannot repay. If you look at the boards, even so there are those desperately looking for more to borrow. </p>

<p>I’m not sure how all of this venting about college loans and the government comes inot play with your mother claiming you as a dependent. And if she took out a loan and paid for your college one year, that seems to be in direct contradiction to the first paragraph of your post. She provided health care for you by DECLARING YOU A DEPENDENT at work, she gave you a car, she took out a PLUS loan to pay for some of your college expenses. She gave you her tax records and financial info so that you could get financial aid at college. Doesn’t sound like a totally uninvolved parent to me.</p>