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[Tom Moore]

I had two children in college for 2 years and my EFC for both years ran
around 11K. The calculations included a second house with a net value of
50K. One son graduated (whew!), is living on his own (whew x 2!)and I sold
the house to pay off bills, etc. (whew x 3!). Between getting rid of the
asset (house) and only having one son in college, I thought it would be a
wash on my EFC. Unfortunately not.

It jumped from 11K to 27K!. There's no way I can see two more years of this
EFC ( I still have one more to go to college ). My son's financial aid
department was not surprised. They recommended I write a letter justifying
more. Any recommended strategies? Does this sound like a reasonable
increase? (everything else pretty much the same). BTW: I also had to fill
out a CSS-PROFILE for this school.

Thanks in advance for this group's wisdom.

Tom

[Steve Blank]

Tom,

The FAFSA EFC is calculated on the parent and student income and assets.
When there are two students in college, the parent's part of the
Federal EFC is split between them. So assuming that the students had
negligible income/assets an $11,000 EFC on each of them last year means
that if there had been only one student that year the EFC would have
been $22,000 for that student.

That your Federal EFC went up even higher to 27K implies that you or the
remaining student's income/assets were higher than the previous year.

The home you live in is excluded from the FAFSA, but not the Profile.
The college using the Profile is including your home in their
calculations, so it's net worth is now also going at 100% into the one
student's Profile FC.

To understand why the EFC jumped so much, you'll have to compare the
information you provided on this years application to last years. You
say you sold the second house - did it generate taxable income for your
tax return? If it did, income pushes the EFC up faster than assets. As
little as $15,000 capital gains on the house sale could account for the
extra $5,000 in this years EFC.

If in fact the change is due to the capital gains, you could point out
to the college that this was a one-time event and not truly indicative
of your 2005 income and ability to pay for college. Some colleges may be
willing to adjust for that, others will not, and it's entirely up to
their discretion.


Steven B. Blank
College Financial Aid Consultants
29 Ives Hill Court
Cheshire, CT 06410
(203)250-7761