Ok! I should have said blatantly not counting assets. (I don’t consider putting assets into a 529 hiding).
Welp. I had a talk with her just now, and it went absolutely nowhere. Basically, the whole thing was just me telling her that hiding asset is wrong and illegal, which could get us in trouble. She denies that it’s not exactly hiding money and lying, but she’s just keeping it for me so that I wouldn’t have too much money in my account. If the school checks my income and bank statements, and see that I have about $10,000 in my account, they will cut my aid. She talked about a whole bunch of other nonsense which I didn’t even know what she was getting at, or how they are related, but basically do the best for yourself and save money. Tl;dr = get aid or get nothing and pay tuition yourself.
Turns out that Mr. (censored) of the century aka my brother is the mastermind behind this. My mom was “reporting” whatever was going on to him while I was in the bathroom. The (censored) called me stupid and told her to just ignore me or whatever. I wasn’t listening to the whole thing, but that’s the gist of it. She’s pathetic, and he just want a power trip.
I think I need to buy a gun to defend myself. If things go wrong and we have a confrontation, I’ll have something to fall back to. Thanks for your replies, guys. But they are Asians, I can’t do anything with my status as the youngest and stupidest child. Welp. I tried.
Nothing else to say. Remember…the fafsa is something YOU sign. When you sign electronically, it is to state that the information on it is accurate.
If you have money stashed somewhere…and it’s not reported…that is NOT accurate.
Once again…getting financial aid by knowingly reporting inaccurate information is fraud. FRAUD. It can result in you losing all aid you have received, your admission status can be revoked, and you can be fined.
I really hope this is a joke.
Put the $10,000 in a new college savings 529 account so that it counts as your parent’s asset at 5.62% ($562)
Then tell your smarty pants brother that this is even less than committing financial aid fraud and reporting only $3000 at the student rate of 20%. ($600)
Have you ever answered the question if your mom’s income is low? Like others said it might not matter.
I like Madison85’s suggestion.
I have heard of this before. It’s not necessarily fraud. We all need to find a way to manage our money.You need to consult professional financial advisors to aid in disclosing your assets. It might save you some money.
Irving844 just what do you think a financial advisor will say? He certainly won’t suggest hiding the money in a cookie jar. Plus the vast majority of financial advisors have no idea the implications for the FAFSA.