FAFSA and other financial aid for college? Grant Vs Loan

if your self-determining and not working you will get about 5,500 depends on the other scholarships you get and whether your working or not and tax

Yes, you can still list UW as your school if you don’t know if youre accepted for sure. You just need to look up the codes for the schools you want to apply for. You should receive financial aid, but your school is what decides what loans and grants to give you. So right now it’s unclear how much money you’ll receive in grants vs. loans. You also will need your W2s if you earned money in 2010 and you will also need the w2 of the parent you’re using on the fafsa, so you probably won’t be able to apply straight away. Don’t forget to fill out the separate financial aid to your school that your accepted to. You will probably have to fill out forms like the fafsa, but are directly for your school’s use. The documents are probably on the website for the school. Hope this helps!

You must report your step-dads income info even if he isn’t going to pay for you to go to college. He is married to your mother and that means his info must go on the fafsa. It does not sound like you or your family is low income, this means no free federal grant money. Te max YOU can get in loans is 5,500 in federal Stafford loans your first year as a dependent freshman. If your school is more than this, then you can question mom to take out a parent PLUS loan for you. Both of these items are LOANS which will need to be repaid. You pay off the stafford loan and your mom pays off the PLUS loan. Her payments start straight away, you don’t have to start repaying until you stop school. If this isn’t enough, you need to find a cheaper school.

Your friend is incorrect. And you should know, that except for the workstudy question, we pretty much ignore the “grant/loan” question on the FAFSA when awarding students. Even when students “reckon” nothing changed, something changed. Because household size, type of tax return filed, number in college, earnings, IRA donations and a number of other things that can change your eligibility “change” over time, your aid eligiblility for grants vs loans will change. Another reason students qualified for grants and loans and then in later years did not is a simple thing called verification. Because we are required to verify a percentage of our students, a student can go for years and years with an errant FAFSA (in rank reported incorrectly) and be awarded aid for which if corrected, the student would not be eligible for. BUT you will never go through your entire college career with a noteworthy amount of grants and not be selected for verification. Once verified, a student who usually qualifies for all kinds of financial aid (grants and loans) may find themselves ineligible for grants and some types of loans previously awarded. While we don’t go back and verify prior years, the government will likely select that student regularly and the student wouldn’t be recieving grants when they shouldn’t be any longer. So if you are filing your FAFSA correctly every year and every year your in rank makes you eligible for grants/loans, you will be eligible for grants/loans every year. If you are filing an errant FAFSA and receiving grants/loans based on that errant in rank, you will get caught at some point and after that, you won’t be getting both grants and loans but loans only. And if anything changes on your FAFSA (number in college, marital status, births, deaths, retirements, layoffs, etc.), your eligibliety for aid will change too. So ignore your friend and accept the grants and loans and be sure to file your FAFSA correctly each year.

When the deferrment was granted did Citi send you a letter? I have requested a deferrment with them in the past and when it was granted they sent me a letter stating the terms. If you have this letter I would find out the date it was set to expire and then compare that to the date they claim you were to repay. Citi also should have been sending you statements during the deferrment. The statements would have said that the loan is in deferrment and no payment is due but it would give you the option of paying the interest on the loan. The only things I can suggest are to find out what the terms of the deferrment were. The only ground you really have is if Citi started your repayment term earlier than they were supposed to. If this is the case then fight it and have them remove the 30 days late. If they followed the term and you just missed the fact that the term was over and you needed to start repaying them there is nothing you can do unfortunately.

Unfortunately there is not much you can do now, since you have paid them you do not have any leverage to use. You could have negotiated a pay for delete agreement but it’s too late now. It sucks, but that’s how it is. Right now you only have two options. 1) Dispute the listing with the credit bureaus and hope that the creditors don’t respond to the investigation request which results in the item being deleted. 2) Send the “goodwill” letter mentioned. In the link is a very excellent sample letter you can edit and mail in to them. I am not affiliated with this site at all, so please don’t consider it “spam.” http://www.creditinfocenter.com/forms/sampleletter8.shtml Excellent luck.

Personally, I would choose a better school. If your school can’t give you enough aid to fund with Stafford loans only… honestly, it’s not a very excellent school. Don’t resort to private loans… private loans are evil. You will need a cosigner, your parents. Jeopardizing both your credit if something terrible were to happen. You should want to have your parents do the PLUS loan. Your parents are responsible for paying this back, not you. Private loans have variable interest rates. Ever year of the sub prime mortgage crisis? This is caused by folks taking out variable rate loans who didn’t know any better. Private loans have MUCH longer payment terms.. so even if the rates are comparable… over the span of paying if off for 25 years instead of 10, they really get MORE of your money…. and the delayed payments option at 8% just compounds the interest and makes it worse.

Go for the PLUS loan. Congress passed legislation in May that allows parents (for the first time) to defer payments until after the student graduates. Repayment of a PLUS loan is much more flexible than a private loan. If they choose, your parents could even spread payments over thirty years to get a lower monthly payment.

If you do enough research and want to pay the loan back yourself, the private loan may be your best bet. Just make sure that whatever loan you get is what you need. Interest rate, deferrment, etc. With a PLUS loan only your parent can pay for this and there is no way to transfer it into your name or consolidate it. You could do it if your parents would be willing to make the payments.