<p>Efc $2. :)</p>
<p>I got 4 – 4 dollars. <em>cheers for my son</em> And I’m considering returning to college, which will split the EFC between us, making it 2 each.</p>
<p>Ive found the EFC to be about 1/4- 1/3 of before tax income
so if your EFC is $4.00, does that mean your income for the year is $12.00?
I also didn’t find that the EFC was actually split
the student EFC does not take into account a parent in college, however the parent EFC will take into account a dependent in school</p>
<p>emeraldkity4 – the EFC allocation must change once you get to a certain point of lower income level. My EFC is $0 and our before tax income was $23000. no assets, AGI $19,900. so it is clearly not 1/4 - 1/3 of the before tax income.</p>
<p>I know there is a certain level of income that is not looked at for basic living expenses- depends on how many dependents and adult earners,
but national average income is about double your before tax, and it seems that without a lot of assets/dependents if your income is average or higher, your ERC is 1/4</p>
<p>As others have said, the financial aid formulas have a basic income level they assume you have to have, and don’t dip into that, just everything you make after that. Your 1/4 rule of thumb might work at high income levels, but once you get below 20K a year, it’s not applicable. </p>
<p>As far as dependent vs. parent in college, if I’m in school, I’ll be doing financial aid, and the EFC will be adjusted per student in college. It may not be cut in half precisely, but it won’t be negatively affected.</p>
<p>For FAFSA
The number in college should include only those family members who are enrolled at least half time and working toward a degree in an eligible accredited Title IV institution of higher education. (Students enrolled in one of the military academies, such as West Point and Annapolis, do not count.) The student should always be counted, even if the student is enrolled less than half-time. Parents are not included in the number in college figure, but instead must contact the school for a professional judgment review</p>
<p>It might just be me, and I understand why someone who is disabled may have such a low income, but someone who is able to go to college, wouldn’t seem to be disabled.
Where can you live for less than $20,000?</p>
<p><i>It might just be me, and I understand why someone who is disabled may have such a low income, but someone who is able to go to college, wouldn’t seem to be disabled.
Where can you live for less than $20,000?</i></p>
<p>Wow. There are tons of reasons why people might have an income of less than 20K. Plenty of single parents live on close to minimum wage in our country. The EFC calculation specifically does not include income of unmarried partners, or of grandparents, as far as I’m aware.</p>
<p>in our case, my husband was unemployed – combine that with a low paying job to begin with and you get a pretty low income. next year our income should be more like $35,000 if he remains employed the whole year.</p>
<p>It is not easy to live on such a low income – and nothing we desire to do, either! </p>
<p>I am in school full-time, trying to get my teaching degree ASAP – that is why I don’t contribute income. I was working and going to school part-time, but I finally decided that I just needed to get the degree since my income as a teacher will significantly help and the jobs I was working (part-time/low-paying) were just helping slightly.</p>
<p>I take 24-26 hours a semester (interesting how much easier that is as an adult – you can imagine I don’t do any EC’s!). And I go full-time in the summer.</p>
<p>I will be done in 2 years – combined master’s and undergrad in education.</p>
<p>I am really watching how this EFC works! – My oldest will just be applying to school after I have been in the work place for one year. With average new teacher salaries at $32,000 in the area – even if my husband does’t increase his salary, our income level will be at $67,000 – a huge difference from what it is now!!! I am trying to plan ahead so that we account for all factors. We will plan on paying for a portion of my son’s school expenses – I just hope he doesn’t have such a large EFC that we end up back at our current level of living!</p>
<p>Our FAFSA EFC is low. The main reason is that there are special rules if you live/work on a farm. Our Profile EFC appears to be $7,000 higher. It will be interesting, come April, to see what S’s FA package will be at the FAFSA only schools and those schools that use both.</p>
<p>My EFC is very low for the same reason as FresnoMom’s family’s; we live on and operate a family. My $9 EFC is looking pretty good right about now, but I will aslo likely have a very different result from schools that use the Profile. When I used an online calculator of institutional methadology, it came up with an EFC of over $80,000! I guess we will both just have to wait and see how it turns out.</p>
<p>Efc: 0$ :]</p>
<p>Wow. There are tons of reasons why people might have an income of less than 20K. Plenty of single parents live on close to minimum wage in our country. The EFC calculation specifically does not include income of unmarried partners, or of grandparents, as far as I’m aware.</p>
<p>Don’t really understand the Wow- I am just trying to see where people are coming from that are adults with college age children but are still only making minimum wage.
The not taking other household income into account explains some of it, but I guess I am puzzled why if going to college is an option now, if further education wasn’t looked at before.
I take my responsibilty as a parent very seriously, and that includes providing for my kids. I realize things “happen”, and that is why I am asking.</p>
<p>if you are referring to my choices, I am happy to explain. I, too, take my job as a parent very seriously and do my best to provide for my kids.</p>
<p>Prior to 9/11, my husband was employed and making $70,000 – not a ton of money, but we were comfortable. after 9/11, there was company reorganization and he was moved to another city and his salary cut. I had been going to school a little bit at a time, but spent most of my time volunteering at my kids school and such.</p>
<p>when we moved, i went back to work and took another class. 6 months later, he was let go. we spend savings and unemployment while he and I worked low-paying wages for several months. then he got another job offer – good salary, but not as high as it had been – $55,000. only catch – they didn’t pay to move us. so we paid for it ourselves (more of our savings) and moved. That job lasted 5 months before the plant closed. More living off savings and unemployment. During this time, I kept working and going to school – but the move put me our of commission for a little while so that I could find yet another job. 4 months later, he was offered another job – only $49,000 but a job, nonetheless! again – no payment for moving, but we had to do something, so we moved. job lasted 4 months. At this point, my parents offered to let us live at a property they had in colorado while we got established. Our plan was for me to finish my degree ASAP and he was to get a job in colorado and we would not be moving again – and that is where we are at.</p>
<p>savings was spent just to live during the bad times, we both worked tons of hours whenever possible – but just living is expensive and without a good salary it just goes! It only takes a few bad years and you can go from having a good job and good savings to the state where you are scrambling to recover. could we have made different decisions and done better – of course! but hindsight is always 20/20. I will tell you, it has given our family a new appreciation of people and their circumstances and a better understanding of money. Never again will I judge someone based on their income without knowing why they are in that situation.</p>
<p>as to why further education wasn’t looked at earlier – I was in no rush. I didn’t plan on going back to work full-time until my youngest was in high school, so I had plenty of time. after that – the moving interfered along with needing to work 40 hours a week – and we couldn’t pay for the tuition. Now I get grants, attend the CC until I have every hour possible that can be transferred and will take as many hours as possible to graduate ASAP.</p>
<p>I am sure there are many other circumstances that would explain a low income – and many times that low income is only for a year or two. Divorce, extended illness without health insurance, death of spouse, unemployment, failure of a small business, etc. – this does not mean that these people don’t care about their kids – they are doing the best that they know how.</p>
<p>Never again will I judge someone based on their income without knowing why they are in that situation.</p>
<p>I work with kids of single moms, some with little education or income, and I don’t feel comfortable asking them a lot of questions, I am just trying to help the kids. But it helps to be able to come on here and ask, because sometimes I feel like the more involved I am with the students I tutor, that I am taking over the parental role, and I don’t want to do that.
For one, I have my own kids and life to worry about, I am usually spread pretty thin as it is, but more importantly, I don’t want my “percieved” competence to be taken as a sign that they can’t do exactly what I am doing for their kids</p>
<p>$875.</p>
<p>College does funny things to people. When else would someone rejoice in being poor?</p>
<p>well thats only if you go to a school that doesn’t gap
many schools do- and even instate public schools often aren’t very affordable for a student with not much income.
We found that since our EFC was pretty close to what an instate public school charged, that a private school that met 100% of EFC looked like a better deal</p>
<p>I live in NY, it is just me and my father living together, my father total income for the 2005 year was $25,437.00 and I would like to go to Tennessee State Universty. How much do you think my EFC will be?</p>
<p>My “wow” was surprise that you weren’t aware people live on less than 20K a year. <em>Many</em> of them do. I managed a family of 4 during the mid '90’s on 12K a year, with my husband working as a writer for a small company. We didn’t have a car, lived in a small apartment, ate carefully, etc. In much of the non-coastal parts of the country (that is, not the east coast, not the west coast) you can still rent apartments for 500 a month, still buy a house that cost 100K or less, etc. There’s also a substantial poor and urban population that lives on far less than I managed to handle, of course. At 12K a year, we were “middle class” a southern suburb. As recently as 1999, I was working in a professional/technical field making 24K a year, which was considered pretty good money in that time and place. </p>
<p>As far as my currently situation, my household has been planning for my children’s college for 3 years now. We knew that because we live in one of the 2-3 most expensive parts of the country (with tiny houses costing 700K and up) that we’d get screwed on EFC, because the calculations don’t differentiate between cost of living in different parts of the country. Because of that, we made choices about income and savings to prepare for the day when I’d have to file FAFSAs. That planning has paid off.</p>
<p>As for the comment that one would think parents would want to do what’s best for their children, well, damn, I have certainly done that. I left college to have a family and have devoted myself to my children. I’ve spent the past few years being a full time mother so that they could have extra support during a difficult time in their lives. I’ve made hard choices about income and employment to ensure we could afford college by having a good financial aid situation. And after all of that, once my children start college, I have a wonderful role model – my mother returned to college at 40, got a degree (and then another!) and changed careers to become a nursing instructor. I followed in my mother’s footsteps in leaving college to have a family, and I intend to follow in her footsteps by returning to college full time once my children are off on their own, too. </p>
<p>There are tons of families in the world, and just as many choices and paths to college and success. Making as much money as possible and saving thousands for education is not the only option, and it’s not a feasible option for many of us, but that doesn’t mean we care less about our children.</p>
<p>I agree that cost of living should be a factor as I also live in a metro area that has easily 1.5X the cost of living of my sister whi lives/works in a college town. She actually qualifies with a lower EFC because she and her husband are rewarded for choosing not to save either. </p>
<p>Our family and kids on the other hand have scrimped and saved and of course are being punished for it. I will have three Ds in college next term (twins entering this coming year) and each SAR came back with an EFC of about 20K. My real question is, when I filed several years back with just one college student, the EFC also came to about 20K on that SAR. I know there is one question in the FAFSA regarding number of family members in college, and, they also have that feature that lets you duplicate parental info on multiple forms, but what relief is allowed for parents with simultaneous college students??? I’m not seeing it.</p>