Financial Aid Checks Apart of Adjusted Gross Income?

Paying for College
1

<p>I’m currently filling out my FAFSA right now.</p>

<p>Question 43d states:
“Student grant and scholarship aid reported to the IRS in your adjusted gross income. Includes AmeriCorps benefits (awards, living allowances, and interest accrual payments), as well as grant and scholarship portions of fellowships and assistantships”</p>

<p>Am I supposed to input the amount of money I received from my 2010 financial aid checks into 43d’s box?</p>

<p>Are the financial aid checks I receive apart of my adjusted gross income?</p>

<p>The grants pay for my tuition first, and the money left in the grant is sent to me in the form of financial aid checks.</p>

2

<p>If your grants/scholarships (but not loans) exceed the cost of your qualified education expenses (tuition, required fees, and books), then that amount is reportable to the IRS and is included in your AGI. You should receive a 1098T from your school, but I would suggest that you calculate the actual amount received/spent by going through your bills and receipts (the 1098 will not include any amounts spent on books). This really has nothing to do with your actual refund amount since schools do bill for non-qualified expenses like housing and meals and refunds often include loans, which are not income.
IRS Publication 970 may be helpful in finding other deductions/tax credits you may be eligible for.</p>

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<p>Are you asking whether these financial aid sources are separate from AGI (“apart”) or a component of AGI (“a part of”). I believe that you’re asking the latter, but your spelling (in both subject and text) indicate the former. </p>

<p>Although these two interpretations are complete opposites, I’m still in doubt after rereading your sentences.</p>

4

<p>The question is self-explanatory. Did you report any of these amounts ON YOUR TAX RETURN (which is the only way it can be AGI)??? If not, the answer is 0.</p>

5

<p>If the question was “self-explanatory”, she would not have asked. Don’t be rude.</p>

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<p>lol @ tmmidds … did you seriously post on a thread 2 and a half years old?</p>

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<p>This thread is two and a half years old.</p>

<p>Edit: xpost with taxguy</p>

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<p>First of all, did you report any scholarship, grants on your 2012 tax return? If you did, were you supposed to have done so? You are only supposed to report the amounts that are in excess of tutition, fees, books and necessary supplies for the 2012 calendar year. Most of the time, it is not an issue, because few kids make enough money to have to owe taxes on those amounts anyways, and few get enough in pure grant, not loans, to make it an issue. But if you did file a return for 2012 and you did owe taxes and you did get scholarship/grant money that had to be included for tax purposes (was taxable), then that portion is in your 1040 AGI and you want to report that amount on FAFSA on the relevant space, so that it can be subtracted out of that AGI. Though the IRS will include scholarship/grant amounts for tax purposes if there is enough to make them taxable and they are not attributable to tution and other things that make them not count, FAFSA will not, so they subtract it out. </p>

<p>It can get tricky because some things that are taxable like what is considered excess grant under some circumstance is not included by FAFSA, whereas somethings that are excluded for tax purposes such as 401K or other qualified plan contributions, have to be added back into the FAFSA income.</p>

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<p>This thread is from January 2011!</p>