<p>We have a winner. Your first guess was on the money,doddsdad. Crunch-y granola goes with Volvos with “canoe racks”.</p>
<p>I like the image of Volvo canoe racks too!</p>
<p>To the OP-- your child should make an appointment with the head of guidance or college counseling asap (i.e. beat the rush before senior year). Wait another week when the paperwork from this year’s seniors is almost over.</p>
<p>Ask the following:
Are there local scholarships which kids from our school have won before? can I see the application materials?
Are there national scholarships for which I qualify?
Are there schools out there that I may not have heard of which give tuition wavers to kids with my stats?</p>
<p>Get the list now… not senior year. You can build your visits (if you plan to visit) or your research around these schools… then add a couple of wild cards if you want to gamble, but this way you’ve got a solid list based on what you can comfortably afford.</p>
<p>At the same time, you and spouse need to visit your HR department at work to see if your kid qualifies for any programs sponsered by your employer or an employer sponsored charitable foundation. Some of these are obscure but lucrative… i.e. scholarships for kids studying forestry if you work for a paper company. Don’t be put off by the number of applicants- most of these give preference to children of employees and often very few people apply.</p>
<p>Our kid got a generous scholarship from H’s employer in a program which gets almost no publicity at work. We thought it was just for Freshman year (and were thrilled) and then in May he got a letter asking for a transcript of his first year grades which he sent for $4. We thought this was just to check that he hadn’t withdrawn or flunked out. In August he got a copy of a check they had sent directly to his school, informing the school that he’d been awarded a second year.</p>
<p>Then, do a quick run on Google of scholarships using any other affiliations your family may have-- Veterans organizations, union membership, Girl Scouts, hearing impaired, First generation Americans living in Boston, etc. You can then sift through these to see if any look promising.</p>
<p>I know the conventional wisdom is to avoid the small ticket scholarships like the plague, but we know several kids who have won dumb sounding things which really make a difference-- $500 from the Local Realtors association ( a check to the kid, not the school) is a flight home for Xmas break; $750 per year from the local firefighters for “good citizenship” is books; often renewable if you maintain a pretty generous GPA. Your GC should have the list, since these organizations often don’t publicize the awards to the public, but just send a letter to the local high schools.</p>
<p>It is so difficult to plan ahead for college finances because where the kids ends up can make a difference in the strategy you should have used. Not much help, I’m afraid. The reason for this is that if your kid ends up with a school that uses FAFSA only, it is wise to invest family money in a primary residence because those assets are exempt. In other words, pay off that mortgage. This does not work for most PROFILE schools as they include home equity as part of the family assets. The only assets exempt are those in qualified pension plans, and schools are beginning to want to know what are in those as well as money gets tighter every year. Grandparents should put money in 529 plans or just in an account designated to go to the student in their will because any money taken out of a 529 is considered income. What I have suggested to families with grandparents in the wings is for them to put the money away as I earlier suggested, and not pay until senior year when the financial aid forms no longer have to be filed. better to borrow the amount they can give in the earlier years. This can make the difference in financial aid awards for those right on the cusp of getting money. </p>
<p>But many times all of this strategy can amount to little since few schools give 100% of need anyways. Such schools will often throw in a package with little relationsship to EFC or need, and is highly dependent on how much they want the student, the old merit within need situation. </p>
<p>I’ve always suggested looking at the financial breakdowns for each school on the list in the USN&WR directory as it gives you averages of what the schools’ financial/merit aid packages. If you are looking at school that covers only 30% of need on average, with much of it loans, you are not going to get much even with every financial contortion under the sun, unless the kid gets a merit type award. The school has lousy financial aid, you are not going to get a good deal from that area UNLESS the school really wants the kid and works out some merit award into the package. And there are some really top schools in this category such as NYU. It is important to know what kind of package a school gives when you are dealing with it. I know there was a post where a parent was aghast at how terribly her daughter was gapped at one school, and when she called financial aid there, was told that no one gets 100% of need. Had she known that the school simply does not meet full aid, or even close to it, it may not have even been on her D’s list except as a possible for merit aid.</p>
<p>It is a really good point that Jamimom makes that you can’t plan ahead for every nuance of financial aid policies at all of the different schools, but if you search, there may be some schools that benefit your own situation better than others. It is worth it to look.</p>
<p>This is a tip from Jamimom and also I think SBMom that I hope they will not mind me repeating, and with it I send my thanks to them. This helped me, and I have passed it along to others who likewise found it useful:</p>
<p>If you are dealing with a school that has good need-based aid, and you have unusual circumstances, or something to add that should have been on your original aid form but you forgot (which is what I did), DON’T give the aid office a long drawn out explanation, DON’T try to explain it over the phone, but send copies of DOCUMENTS that SHOW the expense or change in finances or whatever, with a brief explanation. (Mine was: “Forgot to include this. Does it make a difference?” Response was, “Yes, and we are adjusting the aid accordingly.”) Deal with the financial aid office in financial terms.</p>
<p>Also:
Don’t expect that the most competitive schools are the most expensive. Even before aid, they are not necessarily. </p>
<p>And if you need aid, private schools with good need-based aid can sometimes end up costing less than state schools, so you really need to check out your own financial situation. Use the school’s own financial aid calculator if there is one, for a ballpark estimate. </p>
<p>If you think you don’t qualify for aid, you may at some schools, even if you have well into 6-figure income, and especially if you have more than one child in college. Check it out, don’t assume.</p>
<p>I agree, Cricket, but will also add, don’t expect. I have seen folks who so believe they are going to get a good package that they are bitterly disappointed when they do not. If you are on a budget, make sure you have some financial safeties. Just because your kid is probably the highest stat applicant that year at some school does not necessarily mean he will get merit money even if they give 30% of the class money. Or you may get some token amount that isn’t going to make a dent in the situation. Better to be pleasantly surprised, that to go through the process counting on those chickens before they hatch. You can end up with egg on your face.</p>
<p>I’ve seen some stuff from the Hendrix administration that does indeed suggest Hendrix is trying to build geographic diversity. They are also a school that has trouble getting a full yield from accepted students every year. Here on CC, I’ve noticed a tendency for them to give very nice (and large) merit scholarships to kids from outside their geographic area, probably to satisfy both needs. When we were at Earlham, we met two kids who had friends at Hendrix, had visited, plus a girl who had been accepted at both schools. All three said they found the two schools to be very similar in terms of student body and feel (in spite of all those kids from Tx. and Arkansas). The girl who’d been accepted at both said she was leaning towards Hendrix because of merit money — don’t know more than that, but my daughter and I will probably try to visit at some point.</p>
<p>doddsdad, the colleges that have adopted the standards I described above aren’t trying to do any favors for people in the particular scenarios I described - they are just trying to rectify potential unfairness. For example, in the case of divorced plus remarried spouses, many kids cannot get financial aid because of the income of step-parents who have no legal obligations whatsoever to contribute to their college education, much less the moral one that the financial aid system imposes. So its not that you would want to divorce to get the “benefit” of the rule - its that the rules are there to try to equalize the calculation for families who have been treated as more well-off than they actually were.</p>
<p>We have a winner. Your first guess was on the money,doddsdad. Crunch-y granola goes with Volvos with “canoe racks”.>></p>
<p>Heh, heh. Had a good laugh at this one. I drive an older volvo station wagon and have offered to let my daughter take it to college. She was appalled at the idea of taking a VOLVO station wagon anywhere. When we were at Earlham, I just DELIGHTED in pointing out the many, many Volvo’s in the parking lots to her. </p>
<p>What is funny to me is that I was pretty crunch-granola in college (many here on CC would say I’ve since grown out of that phase and become a pearl-wearing conservative 
) and now my daughter seems to be following in my footsteps. Give her…oh…20 years or so and she’ll out grow it too. And, how much you wanna bet she’ll be driving that volvo station wagon to school in 2006? Since one of the appeals of Earlham for her is their wilderness program (they are the ONLY school I have seen where there is a high ropes course on campus!), she may even be adding a canoe rack before all is said and done. LOL!</p>
<p>It is a mishmash to say the least, but I’ve found that the best bet for merit aid–I’m going to give you advice that we did not follow but found to be true for others–is to apply to schools for whom your child is overly qualified. Look at the stats, find schools (what many on these boards would consider “safeties”) that your son could see himself attending (atmosphere, programs, etc.) and visit and apply. Most of them will rain down merit aid (*there will be some exceptions) and if you have done your homework and played it well, you won’t have too much to worry about. We’re not talking about taking dives here; there are a good many schools that offer excellent educations to interested students–so much so that if you were blindfolded (or had your ears stopped) you wouldn’t be able to distinguish them from schools that raise the hairs up on the back of your neck. It’s a fact. I myself spent a good deal of my adult life keeping my family near enough to what colleges perceive to be an impoverished income level just so I wouldn’t have to worry about such things–actually, for me it’s a matter of principle (as I think you suggested in your OP, it’s not a matter of being able to, I just don’t think its right, or, to put it another way, I choose not to–pay that much for a college education).</p>
<p>Thanks to everyone here for this discussion, especially about the bonds for education. It started me thinking about the fact that about 20 years ago, I was doing savings bond purchases through payroll deductions. I didn’t think there were too many, but with this disussion reminding me that they were in the safe deposit box, I went to the bank, made a list of them (there were more than I thought), and went to the web to find out what they were worth. Holy cow! Even at low interest rates, when compounded for 20 years, it adds up to a lot. This is found money, as far as I’m concerned since I had almost totally forgotten that it was in the bank. Whooooohoooo. With the bonds plus the 529 savings plus the scholarships that S got, we can start to relax. Thanks for reminding me to check that out. And ESPECIALLY thanks to itstoomuch for the suggestion to put the money directly into the 529 plan. That way, we get the state tax break on the ENTIRE amount, whereas we probably would have had to PAY taxes on the gains without the 529.</p>
<p>It’s also a lesson for the young. Put a little away each pay period into something you can forget about. 20 years later, you’ll be turning cartwheels when you dust things off and learn the power of compound interest!!</p>
<p>–Happy Pop (digmedia)</p>
<p>Digmedia; Lucky You. </p>
<p>Very good read and THE book on US Savings bonds: Savings Bpmds: When to Hold, When to Fold and Everything In-Between, and * Savings Bond Insight: The Next Chapter* by Dan Pederson. ph 800-927-1901. I believe worth the price.</p>
<p>Use the <a href=“http://www.ustreas.gov%5B/url%5D”>www.ustreas.gov</a>, ‘Saving Bond Wizard’ to discover total and monthly value of the Bonds.</p>
<p>You will discover that the bonds have a rate of 4% and yield close to 6%, and maybe close to 7-8% when rolled to 529, Riskfree!</p>
<p>Play the interest on the bonds (or dividends from stocks-which is now essentially federally taxfree) against the student loan interest that you may incur. If the Fed and Bond markets holds pretty steady, you can get student student loans at very nearly or even below the cost of the money. In other words, you paid for the school with little out of pocket money and the money that was paid to the school was OPM which you didn’t even pay for. Get it?</p>
<p>When kid finishes college ontinue with the program, pay off the loans with the bonds, or let inflation take care of the loan, just like your mortgage. </p>
<p>In essense you will be covering (minimizing) your risks, maximizing cashflow, and perhaps even increase networth. This may seem to be involved but really is the SAFEST of all the scenarios that anyone can devise. That I am aware of, or can think of.</p>
<p>Since the bonds are NOT education EE Bonds, you can place the proceeds into either a 529 in your name or in kid’s name. Anybody can have a 529, IRA, UGMA, or even a joint account. </p>
<p>What we found that if you save and invest early, everything will be OK. And if you save and invest early, the resulting increase of the money is really a tax gimmick, that most people and accountants really don’t understand. That’s why the wealthy stay wealthy and the middleclass stays screwed and nailed. </p>
<p>Always be aware of the: Oh, Well rule</p>
<p>addendend to post #16. Bro has been with another big bank since this conversation. The bank gets bigger every year with more analyses done with even more technoids & ivy league’rs. And every year, it seems that their screwups get bigger and better. Oh, Well.</p>
<p>In the spirit of the HitchHiker’s Guide: “Thanks for the fish,” “43”</p>
<p>I only have a minute this morning, but I want to thank everyone also. I’d also love for the thread to continue with more ideas, experiences and suggestions. Every suggestion may not apply to our situation, but it will apply to someone on this board. </p>
<p>Calmom, If my response to your post sounded like I thought the colleges were doing inappropriate favors to people, I didn’t mean it that way. I just think there are so many strange ironies in the way this system works. </p>
<p>Digmedia, We need to discuss the finder’s fee due to the OP of this thread!</p>
<p>Personally, we ONLY use the 529 as a conduit for the bonds, IRA, Coverdell, UGMA. We do Not use the 529 as an investment or savings vehicle. I believe that a 529 has too many gotchya’s for those of us with kids in college or near college. </p>
<p>The 529 may sound great but the gotcha is that the tax breaks you get- the less flexible vehicle you have. A 529 that loses money has a very bad sting that even calamine will not mask.</p>
<p>What is the question?</p>
<p>Digmedia’s and my bonds were purchased when the interest on these bonds were fixed at relatively high rate for a set number of years and had a guaranteed minimum rate after the initial period. This was when Inflation was still pretty high in the mid 80’s, Pres Reagan was cutting taxes to the wealthy, spending big bucks on defense (rumsfield and cheny), and VP GHW1 still covertly running the intelligience establishment; and our congresspeople agreeing to the largest deficits in history thru generous entitlements. The Government simply needed bucks.</p>
<p>Today’s bonds are very different. The Oh, Well, factor about situational changes is appropriate.</p>
<p>ask the ant.</p>
<p>Get over it. No matter what the EFC is, for middle class, it means liquidation of an asset or getting a loan which you will later have to liquidate an asset or work longer. </p>
<p>Your EFC is really a non-issue. Think about it. Its late and I have to be up very early in morning.</p>
<p>Had a certain unnamed company not declared the largest bankruptcy in history, cutting my 401k value by mucho mucho dinero, I wouldn’t be talking about the need for strategies. But, as they say, Life Happens.</p>