If you want to find out what your Expected Family Contribution (EFC) will be, I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to dry run the Family Contribution Report. You can create an account on SSS by NAIS account and fill in all the finances and documents. It would cost some fee to run the report ($41) and you need to choose a school to send the report to. There must be schools that are still accepting rolling applications which you may not apply at all. It is a practice run after all.
The point of this exercise is to answer the question -
If the EFC comes out to be very high, say 20K more than you were thinking of spending, due to various details of your finances (having lived responsibly, no debts, large retirement accounts, etc)
would you consider having your child apply to Boarding Schools at all?
It might be useful to have this EFC information sooner than later, in February after you and your child invested months of time applying to BS. Many families are shocked at the SSS Report.
Our EFC came out basically we can afford full pay. There are ChoatieMom and SharingGift who bit the bullet and went full pay as we did.
http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/prep-school-parents/1575928-middle-class-family-getting-ready-to-pay-in-full-p1.html