The Redundancy of College Financial Aid Applications

OK, so we are one of those families who fall through the financial aid cracks with regard to sending our son to college. While it may look on paper like we could afford to pay to send our son to any college in the country without receiving a penny of financial aid, the reality is that there is no luxury of extra cash for that purpose. And we are not extravagant. We take few, if any vacations, and the ones we do take are always budget-conscious. We do not eat out often, and we are all really homebodies. We drive fairly average low-key cars and have an "average" house. Although we now have one private school payment, neither of our kids were in private school for the past 6 years. While we are truly thankful and blessed that we do have what we have, we have worked really hard to get here and there is no "relaxing" yet.

So, even though the likelihood is that there will be little or no financial aid thrown our way, we still need to fill out the forms. OY...the forms, and then some. And the redundancy. Yes, we have to submit our tax returns. But then why do we have to dissect our tax return and rewrite it on the financial aid form? Can't they just look at the tax return and then just ask additional questions? They want you to "estimate" what you made in 2009 (since no tax forms have been done yet) and then later say what you think you made in 2009. Huh?? Does someone get paid by the question? It is easy to see why someone in our position might just "give up" and say "forget it" since we probably will be laughed at anyway for applying. But we will not give up. We need to give it a shot too. You NEVER know what might happen, especially when unemployment looms this year...

As we return to the dreaded forms, there is a thought that if we do it with a smile, and with patience, we might actually get through it!