<p>Hi! Any help would be great…</p>
<p>Family income: about 100k but we just bought a house.
Ethnicity: white, Russian (bilingual)
Siblings: one, but she is considerably younger than me (??)
Special circumstances: physically disabled</p>
<p>Do I have a good chance at getting financial aid? o.o I am really freaked out about this, please help me this is so stressful!!! I had a talk with my dad a few days ago, I was CRYING because I got the impression that basically I am financially screwed for LIFE if I go to college, and now I feel really stressed… THANKS!! For anything you can tell me…</p>
<p>p.s. Loans are a last resort, for understandable reasons.</p>
<p>You should run your family income/asset numbers through one of the online financial aid calculators. This will give you an estimate of what your family will be expected to contribute towards your college education. It will be an ESTIMATE.</p>
<p>With a family income of $100,000, your EFC (expected family contribution) per the FAFSA will probably be in the $25,000 range…maybe even as high as $30,000 (FAFSA EFC is about 1/4 to 1/3 of gross income…depending on other assets).</p>
<p>This means you will not likely qualify for any federally funded need based grants. You will get a Stafford loan, whether subsidized or not would depend on the cost of attendance at your school.</p>
<p>Do you have significant expenses associated with your physical disability? If so, this might be viewed as a special circumstance by your college. There really isn’t anywhere on the FAFSA to put undue medical expenses. If this is the case, it is up to the college to decide if it is a special circumstance for financial aid adjustment or not. You would have to have documentation of any expenses you wanted them to consider.</p>
<p>The purchase of the family home will not affect your financial aid in that debt is not considered on these applications. Your primary residence (is that what the family purchased?) is not reported on the FAFSA.</p>
<p>Now…if your schools use the Profile, some of them will consider a portion of the equity in your home as an asset.</p>
<p>There are some schools where a family income of $100,000 would yield very significant need based aid. These are amongst the most competitive colleges…Yale, Stanford, Harvard for example. Students with the income in the $100,000 range have very favorable need based aid. But, you have to get accepted at these schools first.</p>
<p>You are wise to be looking at this now. I would suggest you look for threads here by Momfromtexas who found some fine financial aid for her kiddos.</p>