Second Home and 529 Plan......

thumper1
Sat, 08 Aug 2015 17:42:39 +0000

Need based financial aid is primarily determined by parent income…and then assets. If your parent income is high enough, it might not make any difference what you otherwise do. You might not qualify for need based aid anyway.

Also,the very vast majority of colleges do NOT meet full financial need anyway. So all of this might not matter at all in terms of netting need based aid at most schools.

Your $117,000 real estate asset would put you out of the running for federally funded need based aid…unless you are VERY low income and meet some other criteria (whereby assets are not counted).

I am hoping someone else will clarify but I don’t think 529 distributions count as income if they are used to pay qualified educational expenses for college.