Chiming in to share our experience with the retirement/FA issue. We have only ever been dealing with one school (exeter), so take this info for what you will. I know every school’s financial aid office has different methods/resources/priorities.
We both work in the public sector so we do not pay into Social Security. But we do have mandatory pension contributions. Although we report the balances of our pension plans on the PFS, according to Exeter, pensions are not considered as assets in the same way that other retirement plans are, for similar reasons. Like Social Security, that money is not available to us at this moment in time to draw on the way that a 401k, etc. ‘could’ be. It’s not ours until a certain age/service date. However, when you report this on the PFS, it absolutely is calculated in the same way that other plans would be. And it skews your EFC. So it’s possible that other schools weigh it the same.
That said, we do also have 457 accounts to supplement our pensions. I was particularly nervous to receive this year’s financial aid award, because we got through his first year by reducing the amount of money we are contributing to these plans and rerouting that to our portion of tuition payments. This helped pay the bill to Exeter, but as you can guess it raised our taxable income, which resulted in more taxes and also looks like we made more money when it came time to do this year’s PFS! The est. family contribution was almost 9k more than last’s year’s.
But the school must really weigh a lot of contributing information, because this is the second year in a row that our package does not look much like our PFS would predict.
We have little debt but VERY few assets, and apparently the school looks favorably on this (in their magical formula) because last year our FA award was about 5k more than the EFC would have indicated, and this year it’s about a 9k difference.
Bottom line: I think if you report everything, and have good communication with the school, and have genuine need, they will come up with a fair award (if they have the resources, of course).