@thermom We actually put a data cap on the kids’s phones due to snapchat (dd) and youtube videos of gamers playing Madden (ds.) DD has learned to manage her data now. DS still usually runs out halfway through the month.
The good thing about college-related taxes is that no one really understands the rules (probably including the IRS), so in my opinion: “No harm, no foul”. :))
It’s like trying to understand what ‘EFC’ really means. Hopeless.
(hi IRS. Love you.)
But @Mom2aphysicsgeek, all of the tax info we get from the school is in her name. she filed this year with the scholarship tax info. I guess we will see what happens to our returns this year!
Thank you everyone! I appreciate everyone’s perspective on the issue. It gave me a lot to think about it. 
@carpoolingma How did you put a block on data? We have ATT and it was a nightmare trying to limit D from going over. Now I just make her pay for the overages. She goes over often due to snapchat, Twitter, Instagram, etc. She really just needs an unlimited plan and I’m probably going to move her to a different carrier once her contract is up so that she can get an unlimited plan (not offered by ATT).
I don’t get the snapchat thing at all.
As for working…probably.
Ideally not freshman year but certainly summers and then part time after that. He will need to have skin in the game. While I wish that weren’t the case, it is. And he wants to so it would likely happen anyway. SS11 did, SD14 has not. Yet. We hope that will change though soccer does take up a lot of her time so there is a bit of a pass on that one.
If S ends up with a non music major, music scholarship for playing…we will likely consider that “work”.
@mtrosemom This is our 2nd yr having to fill out taxes for full-ride scholarship $$. If the amt taxable is beyond $2100, it must be reported on form 8615 which is the form for the kiddie tax. It is not on our taxes, but our child’s. But he has to pay at our unearned income rate.
https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/i8615.pdf
[quote]
Purpose of Form
For children under age 18 and certain older children described below in Who Must File, unearned income over $2,100 is taxed at the parent’s rate if the parent’s rate is higher than the child’s. If the child’s unearned income is more than $2,100, use Form 8615 to figure the child’s tax.
Unearned Income
For Form 8615, “unearned income” includes all taxable income other than earned income as defined later.** Unearned income includes taxable interest, ordinary dividends, capital gains (including capital gain distributions), rents, royalties, etc. It also includes taxable social security benefits, pension and annuity income, taxable scholarship and fellowship grants not reported on Form W-2, **unemployment compensation, alimony, and income (other than earned income) received as the beneficiary of a trust.
Who Must File
Form 8615 must be filed for any child who meets all of the following conditions.
- The child had more than $2,100 of unearned income.
- The child is required to file a tax return. 3. The child either:
a. Was under age 18 at the end of 2015,
b. Was age 18 at the end of 2015 and did not have earned income that was more than half of the child’s support, or
c. Was a full-time student at least age 19 and under age 24 at the end of 2015 and did not have earned income that was more than half of the child’s support.
And, students cannot use scholarships toward their own support. They must provide 50% of their support without any scholarship, grant or fellowship $$.
Folks were talking about when AP scores are available, and doing some IP spoofing to get scores early (NOT it!). Not sure if this was posted at that time, but here is the release schedule:
https://apscore.collegeboard.org/scores?excmpid=SM48-ED-CB-tw
Thanks @2muchquan. Looks like we will have to wait until the last day regardless because we will be on a vacation w/o internet (oh my!). S could check if he wants to earlier, but he probably won’t remember or think about it. He’s a total type B person.
@itsgettingreal17 Verizon has a family monitoring type of add-on that is an extra $5 per month and covers all of the lines. You can use it to set time restrictions. I don’t and even if I kid, the kid know how to work around it. You can block numbers, restrict calls, etc. We don’t do any of that. BUT, the plan is worth its weight in gold just for the data limits!
@itsgettingreal17 I have AT&T and you can go in and just shut the data off at anytime for each user. So if you get a notice you are getting close to the data, you can go in and turn it off until the new billing cycle.
@carpoolingma I’m chugging along with you out of breath!
@itsgettingreal17 I won’t require my kids to work. They are fortunate to have a lot of money saved and I feel that they should focus on school and being social etc. @srk2017 exactly!
@RightCoaster my kids love snapchat. I even have an account and it keeps me up to date with them and my nieces and nephews. Love switching faces @MotherOfDragons so creepy!
I also have AT&T and I believe you may also limit the amount of data any particular line gets. I was trying to find that online, but I couldn’t see that feature today. That may be an AT&T store question.
@itsgettingreal17 wrote
First, dump the evil empire that is ATT.
Then, get T-mobile. They’re a lot more flexible about limiting and controlling data. They throttle the girls down when they blow past their allowance each month. There’s also a commercial that involves Rick Astley (Rick Rolled!) for a company that lets you delegate how many gigs each person gets. Maybe Sprint?
We can’t get a decent signal in our house because it’s made of rocks (literally) and we live way out in the exurbs, so the kids rely on wifi on their phones. Which we shut off at the cable modem at 9:30 every night with a timer. Works fantastic. Comcast was charging us on our overages, and this solved the problem.
I suppose it does depend on where you live. Best signals for us are AT&T and Verizon. Sprint is so-so. T-Mobile pretty bad in our neighborhood. Lucky it works for you because I hear the cost is better. My kids are pretty good about watching their data after they had to pay the overage from their saving.
I really enjoy following the conversations about different issues and what parents and students think!
Working:
I definitely don’t want D to work freshman year. As an engineering major, she’ll be working extra hard already. She also has a hard time with transitions as it is, so work might be too much. (She has a button that says “I welcome change, as long as nothing is altered or different.”) She is very interested in co-op, and I think that would be great. Otherwise, summer internships would be great (I’d consider it work whether paid or unpaid).
D11 is finishing up her 5th year of undergrad (and heading into 6th – long story). She’s been working two part-time jobs since junior year. She also does volunteer hours at the student health center in preparation for physical therapy school. Luckily she enjoys both the jobs (one on-campus and one off) and gets along well with both her employers.
News:
D17 and I listen to NPR news on the long commute (40 minutes) to school (except for recently when we’ve been listening to admissions podcasts!) We also enjoy discussing articles that one or the other of us has read. She’s particularly interested in stories on the environment, LGBTQ and women’s issues, and politics. We watch a number of the satirical news shows, with John Oliver being our favorite. D11 doesn’t keep up very much (except for the current election). S18 is too busy texting his girlfriend or making youtube videos with his friends to digest any news. I’m going to check out theSkimm.
New SAT scores not as good as you think:
Okay, now I want to cry. We’re looking for merit and I’ve been making sure (with a few exceptions) that D’s scores were near the top for the colleges she’s looking at. I haven’t looked at everything (too scared probably), but I feel like a lot of her strong matches may actually be somewhere between reachy matches and reaches (with little chance for merit). At least her safeties still appear to be safeties. I probably need to convince her to cross off at least a few schools (which she absolutely doesn’t want to do at this point) and maybe look further (when I’d hoped we were pretty much finished looking). Uggh.
@snoozn, if your D won’t cross any schools off of her list, maybe you can get her to prioritize the list and do the applications for the ones lower on the list after the top of the list ones have been completed. After doing 7 or 10 applications, she may not be so interested in completing the ones at the list bottom. Also, don’t freak out about the SAT scores yet. At least wait util the May score and even the June scores start being reported. That should give you a better sense of where your D’s scores fit in. Also may give the CB more info to revise their percentages or whatever.
Work: My D17 will have to work. Financially, no choice. My D13 has been doing work-study since freshman. I guess it’s about 8-10 hours a week. First year, she got the job that’s so unrelated to her interest. Second year, she got the job that’s in her area of interest and this experience is actually changing the direction of her possible graduate work in the future.
News: We cut the cable few years back, so no news. I miss it though. I don’t do FB so I’m totally in the dark until the following day when I get to read the newspaper at work. However, we are planning to go back to the very basic Comcast because me and D17 really really wants to watch summer Olympics!!! I don’t play sports and don’t watch professional sports (unless Seahawks is at Superbowl) but I love love Olympics!
My D17 hates news programs. It’s full of depressing news. She doesn’t want to hear them right before going to bed.
Work: D is absolutely going to end up working. I think it is a very valuable professional and social experience, and I refuse to fund any of her fun activities so she will need a source of income for those. Whether she ends up working immediately or not will depend, but she will hopefully qualify for work study jobs with flexible hours.
News: D is an absolute news junkie who gets alerts from about 5 different news sources direct to her phone and listens to a few different news podcasts. I’m not entirely sure how she deals with it, but her argument is that news is often just as positive as it is negative. Either way, she is always informed. S gets his news through an RSS feed on his phone that he customizes with websites. Mostly it is tech and science news that he can scroll through in a free moment and pick and choose what he likes enough to read an article.
S finished his Online Multivariable Calculus Class from H*ll and got an A on the final today and an A- in the class!! Yay! <:-P <:-P
He plans to never again take a math class with essentially no lectures (just some short videos that came with the textbook), no classmates, no discussion, and no partial credit. He did the practice exam 4 times this past week (it generates new questions each time), because he had to get fast enough to do the whole test in 2 hours while still being totally accurate. (He was never super speedy at math, and needs to write a little slowly to make it legible enough not to make dumb mistakes.) But, he knows he can do a class that requires probably 12-15 hours a week of homework, so he feels really good about himself.
There are so many things he can do now with all that time. He mentioned that he might even clean his room this weekend!
Now it feels like AP test week is finally over! 3 1/2 weeks of school left, but that is mainly projects, I think.
Catching up…
Congrats on your D’s award, @Mom2aphysicsgeek !! Congrats to @greeny8 's D on NM, too! <:-P <:-P
@carachel2 Ahh, the cute little bouncy chair memories…
Work:
S will need to work in labs as part of his physics degree, but I don’t know whether that will be paid as an undergrad. I suppose he’ll get paid work related to his degree program over the summers. His current research professor just got a big grant, and told S that he could get a paid fellowship over the summer if he didn’t get into his summer program. The undergrads in that lab get paid over summers but earn research credits during the year. S heard the professor pays them enough to reimburse the tuition for the research credits.
He might get some programming work on the side during college. That would probably pay better than physics lab work, so maybe he can balance the two. He has a potential contract for game programming related to computer hacking, and can look into that more seriously now that the Online Class from H**l is over. He got interviewed over Skype for it a few days ago.
Back in the day, I found some college jobs to be useful and interesting, and others not. Working in an entomology lab (yup, fly larvae) taught me a lot that was useful in the labs for my chemistry classes and I worked with nice people. However, when I was a waitress, I only learned that smoking sections are awful and what to do if your paycheck bounces.