Fafsa & Ugma accounts

vballmom
Wed, 27 Feb 2008 23:33:50 +0000

The law on UGMA/UTMA accounts is clear; these assets belong to the student.

gadad’s point is well taken in that page 5 (parents’ assets, in purple) defines “investment” as including UGMA/UTMAs. However, this same definition of “investment” is used in the student assets section of FAFSA. There should be no double-counting of assets. My reading is that UGMAs that belong to the student for whom the FAFSA is being filed should be listed as the student’s asset (and assessed at 20%), not the parents’ asset.

This still doesn’t answer the question of how to handle sibling UGMAs: declare them as parent assets (assessed at 5.6%) or ignore them completely for FAFSA, as Chedva asserts? I vote for the latter! But it would be nice to get a definitive answer for those of us who have more than one child with a UGMA/UTMA.