Understanding Financial Aid Offers & Paying the College Bill

Good evening and welcome to Understanding Financial Aid Offers and Paying the College Bill. My name is Shawn Morrissey. I am the Director of College Relations for MEFA. I've been with MEFA for about six months now, but I have about 30 years of experience in financial aid. I was at Framingham State University for 18 years and UMass Medical School for 10 years, and I also worked at Mount Wachusett Community College at the beginning of my career.

So hopefully I'll have some good information to share with you. Thank you for joining us. I'm going to go over a little bit of the logistics for tonight to start. So the audio settings will allow you to control the volume levels. The chat feature is disabled for this evening. If you need to communicate and ask questions, you can do that in the Q&A at the bottom of the screen.

If you need to get my attention, you can use the “raise the hand” feature. And I will try to answer your question. And we're also recording this. And we will be sending out a copy with a link of the recording and the full presentation to you within the next couple of days.

So a little bit about MEFA. MEFA is a state authority that was created by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in 1982. A group of colleges and universities actually petitioned the Massachusetts State Legislature to create MEFA in order to offer low-cost loans to families and also to provide training and information to families about how to save and pay for college.

So we offer some savings plans for families, like 529 plans. We also offer some loans for families. But we also offer a lot of free guidance like this webinar for this evening. And if you go to our website, you will see, if you sign up for emails there, you will find out information about all kinds of different events that we hold and different webinars like this with some great information.

So, first of all, congratulations on your college acceptances, both to students and parents who may be on the webinar tonight. It's a big and exciting time, and I know that there's a lot of worry and information that you need in order to help you make the decision of which college will be best for the student and family.

So things we’re going to be going over tonight is understanding your financial aid offers. Know your options if you haven't applied yet for financial aid, so you can still apply if you haven't done so already. Learn how to calculate the balance due. We're going to be showing you some tools that we have available to help you with that, ways to look at those bills, and how to make a financially wise college decision, how to pick the right college based on finances as well as their academics. And develop a plan for paying that college bill once you make the decision.

So first let's talk a little bit about the timeline and what is normally happening for students during this period. So during the month of March, students have usually received their admissions decisions, financial aid offers from schools that have early decisions, early action. Some schools may also be sending out their award letters to students who have received admissions during the regular cycle as well.

Students should have submitted all of their applications for admissions at this point. There are some schools that would still be receiving or accepting admissions applications at this point. Community colleges will have rolling admissions deadlines, and there's a few other schools that may have later deadlines if you haven't submitted that already.

But for most students, that process should already be completed. In April, that's when the bulk of the admissions decisions and financial aid offers are delivered to families. So you should be receiving those at this point, over the next few weeks if you haven't already. And this is when you want to start comparing all the offers that you receive for financial aid and for admissions.

Take a look at those to see what the student wants academically and also financially, how that's going to work, and start comparing those offers from financial aid. And I'll be showing you a few of those tools to use to compare those offers in just a few minutes.

And National Decision Day is May 1st. So most schools are going to ask you to make a deposit by May 1st to say that you are coming to the school. And most of those deposits are non-refundable. So those will not be refunded to you if you decide not to go to the school. In May and June, you're setting up for monthly payment plans. If you are planning to go that route, we'll talk a little bit more about monthly payment plans in a few minutes.

And you also start researching your private loan options. And students should be receiving information in May or June about when they're going to be receiving their fall semester bill. The way most colleges work is they bill in two cycles. One for the fall semester and one for the spring semester. So you'll be receiving two different bills.

Some schools will be sending out those bills in the mail to you. Other schools will just have that available on the portal. So make sure that the students know how that bill is going to be delivered to you so that you don't miss any deadlines for bills. And then in July, that's usually when the bill starts becoming due, usually in late July, early August, those bills start being due.

So that's when you want to start applying for private loans and finalizing those plans to pay for the fall semester bill.

Let's talk a little bit about financial aid and what might be on those letters that you received. So there are two types of grant aid that schools award, and those are based either on merit, which means it's awarded in recognition of something the student has done, an achievement that they've had, either in high school, in sports, doing community service, athletic talent. And the criteria for these are going to differ from school to school.

So different schools will have different merit-based aid programs. Some schools don't offer merit-based aid at all. They will offer only need-based aid. And often merit based aid will have requirements for renewal. Like for example, a student would have to maintain a 2.8 GPA in order for that to be renewed every year in some schools, other schools, if it's an athletic scholarship, they may have to be on a certain sport team every year in order to have that scholarship renewed. If it's an artistic merit-based scholarship, they may have to be in a certain art program in order for that to happen.

But each school will line up for you what those criteria look like for renewal. So just make sure that you're aware of what those are, so if the student is receiving merit-based aid, what they have to look at in the future to make sure that they receive those every year.

Need-based aid is based on the family's financial eligibility, and this is usually based on the information that you've recorded when you filled out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, and possibly the CSS Profile form. And all the schools will make that determination based on a standardized formula, which is cost of education less the family contribution, the estimated family contribution. And that becomes the need for the need-based aid for federal aid. You should see most aid from federal sources, like the Pell Grant will be very similar from school to school. There are some federal programs like the SEOG Grant that different schools will have different amounts available to distribute. So that federal amount may vary from school to school.

And then schools themselves also have need-based aid that they're going to be awarding as well. And institutions will have, again, very different formulas for who they're going to be awarding that need based aid to, or how much that they have available to award.

Some schools will have a very large pool of need-based aid. Other schools will have a smaller pool of need-based aid, but those awards will be smaller for those schools. So you may see a wide variety of different awards from different schools, and that's because each school has a different availability of aid that they can award to students.

So when you want to take a look at your award letter, and some may look a little different than others, the format is similar from school to school, but it's not going to be exactly the same. So you want to take a look and hopefully they're well labeled for you so that you can tell the grants from the loans on there.

And the example on the right, you see there's an ABC University grant that was clearly a grant. The Federal SEOG. The stands for Supplemental Education Opportunity Grant. So the G in that stands for grant, but that's not spelled out in this example. So you may not be aware that that one is a grant, but that is a grant.

So you might want to check on the institution's website at that point to see exactly what that award is, if it's a grant or a loan. So grants do not need to be paid back where loans do. So you want to know the difference between those when you're looking at the award. And most schools will delineate again what a federal grant or loan is, what a state grant or loan is, as opposed to an institutional grant or loan, as well to help you differentiate what the source of those are.

There are also, you see on here, a work-study program listed on here. How work-study works is a student can get a job, usually on campus or in the local community, and they would have to work part time hours and receive a paycheck from that every couple of weeks or every month, and they can use that for spending money.

The work study usually is not deducted from the bill, but is included on an award letter. And then you'll see here that there are Federal Direct subsidized and unsubsidized loans on the award. Those are federal loans in the student's name, and I'll be going over those a little bit more in depth in just a moment.

And all of these financial aid offers may look different. You may actually see as well, some schools may include a parent loan on the financial aid offer. Just be aware that you're eligible to file for a parent loan or apply for a parent loan at every college. But some schools will put that on the award letter to make that look like the student is receiving more aid from that school, but that's an availability and that's a credit-based loan that we'll go over in just a moment, that's available to you at every school.

So, if you see that on the award letter, take that out of consideration when you're comparing them.

Excuse me. Sorry about that. I have something stuck in my throat. So, for Federal Direct Student Loans, the student, the borrower, there's no credit check that the student has to go through in order to qualify for that. As long as they haven't defaulted on a previous student loan, which if they're just their first time in college, they don't have to worry about that, they're guaranteed to be able to receive that.

And there are annual limits on those loans. So for freshman year, students can borrow up to $5,500 from this program. For sophomore year, $6,500. Junior and senior year is $7,500. And there's two types of loans, and those are based on need. Subsidized loan, the interest does not accrue until after the student leaves school, and the unsubsidized loan, the interest accrues immediately.

So, if the student has need, they can receive that subsidized loan up to a certain amount. If they don't, they'll receive the unsubsidized loan. There is a fee on that loan of just over 1%, and that fee is deducted right from the proceeds of the loan. So if the student is receiving $1,000 in a loan, they'll receive, $990 will be sent to the school.

The other $10 is kept for the fee. There's a promissory note and entrance counseling that a student has to complete at studentaid.gov. And they would do that usually once at the beginning of their student career, on their first year of school, and that should be good for their entire period.

And there's no payments while the student is in school, and there are many repayment options after the student leaves school. They can usually, standard repayment is 10 years, but that can be extended up to 25 years in certain programs. And they also have income-based repayment programs, where they look at what your income is.

They will allow you to pay a percentage of that income on that income-based repayment. We have a great session coming up on all of the different repayment options that we'll be having in June if you want to find out about those different repayment options.

There's also a process called verification that the student may be selected for if you receive information from the school saying that you were selected for verification. It's not that you did anything wrong. This is the third percentage, about 30% of students are randomly selected for a process called verification.

And colleges will ask to verify different data that you recorded on your financial aid applications. And different schools may require different information from the student. So just check with those student portals to see exactly what information they're requesting from you. And some schools may ask you to complete that verification before they send you an award, and other schools will ask you to complete that after they've already sent you the award.

Some of the things they may be asking for is a time to return transcript, verification worksheets, asset account statements. But they'll outline exactly what that information is that's needed. If when you receive that verification request, you're not sure exactly what they're asking for, just make a call to the financial aid office, they'll clarify for you exactly what they're looking for.

Make sure you review all the correspondence from the colleges. Log into the college web portal to make sure that there isn't any information there that you haven't received in the mail, that something might be waiting, might be waiting for more information from you to complete this verification process.

Because for most schools, they're not going to be able to disperse the money or release the money to help you pay the bill until you've completed this verification process. And that for some students, you won't have to complete verification at all, so you don't have to worry about that process. But just be aware that you may be asked for that throughout. if you're not asked in the first year, you may be asked for that in subsequent years.

If you've not yet applied for aid, you can still do that. You want to submit the FAFSA, the Free Application for Federal Student Aid. You can go to studentaid.gov in order to complete that. At this point, you've probably missed most of the college priority deadlines, but that doesn't mean you won't receive any aid.

There may not be as much or any institutional aid left at most schools. But different schools have different policies on what they will award to students after they've met the deadline. But for federal aid, including direct loans that's available all year, if you're Cal Grant eligible, those are available to you all year.

Massachusetts, their state aid deadline is May 1st. So, make sure that if you haven't applied yet, please do so by May 1st, so you can be eligible for any Massachusetts state aid. But, like I said, many of the college financial aid deadlines have passed, and if you miss the deadline for this year, you can still apply next year.

Just make sure you try to make that deadline for it next year. For most schools, the first year award and second year award are all separate processes, so you can reapply. You have to reapply each year. But if you miss the deadline one year, that doesn't usually affect the next year's financial aid.

Payment plans are open to all families. Most schools, some schools will have a payment plan available for families and how that works is instead of paying in two lump sums, once for fall and once for spring, you can break that up into either 10 to 12 monthly payments, depending on how early that you enroll in that program, so that you're making smaller payments over the year, rather than making two large lump sum payments.

There's usually a small enrollment fee of about $50 for those payment plans, and you have to pay that once per year and to break those payments down. And you may apply for private loans at any point for most private loans, just like the MEFA Loan. You're not required to file for financial aid or file a FAFSA in order to qualify for those, but we always recommend that you apply for the FAFSA to see what federal student aid might be available to you before you start applying for private loans.

If a student is on the wait list at school, especially if that's their first-choice school, they are on the wait list. Just some things to think about the wait list. Some schools have a really long wait list and they don't ever accept students from it. It depends on, from school to school, how many students have already deposited, how many spaces they have left, if they're able to take students off the wait list at all.

At some schools, those accepted off the wait list may receive minimal financial aid, and you won't know that until you are taken off the wait list. So, you shouldn't just assume that you're going to receive the same level of financial aid at a school that you're on the wait list at, as the schools that you've already received the award letters at. Some schools may give less aid to students that are coming off the wait list.

And remember to submit an enrollment deposit at another school, even though it's usually non-refundable, because there's no guarantee that the student will come off the wait list. So if the first choice school is going “you're on the wait list”, go to your second best school that you've been accepted at and put an enrollment deposit at that, the one that you decide that is the second best option for the school, for the student, so that they're not left in a situation where they don't come off the wait list and have nowhere to go in the fall.

Here are steps to take when you're on the wait list. You want to formally accept your spot on the wait list. Write a short note to the admissions counselor. Tell them about any situations that you might have where if you have really great grades in the last semester that since you've applied, if there have been any awards that you've received since you've applied, any accomplishments that you've had, those are great things to point out in a note to the admissions counselor to see if that can differentiate you from the other students on the waitlist so that they might think about taking you off that waitlist.

Update the school with recent grades and awards. Keep in touch with the school over social media. And watch your email for updates from the school and hopefully you'll receive some good news that you've taken off that list.

Now, you want to calculate your balance due. Once you are looking at the colleges, you want to look at the charges from the school and they can subtract from that your financial aid and your enrollment deposit, all of the non-refundable enrollment deposit I was just talking about.

That is taken off of the first fall semester bill. And that becomes your balance due. And for the college charges, they should have tuition, fees, housing, food. Health insurance is a little bit different where if the family already has health insurance that covers the student, then you can usually waive the health insurance at most schools and not have to incur that cost from the school directly.

We have a great tool that's free to use on the MEFA website. If you go to mefa.org/college-cost-calculator, and I'm just going to toggle over to that to show you what that might look like when you're comparing the cost for different schools. So I just entered in some examples here from some different schools with the tuition fees.

They range from $20,000 up to $50,000. For housing, they're all around between $7,000 and $8,000. Books and supplies all around $1,000. The health insurance is, I put $2,000 in here, but if you do have your own insurance, you can just take that out on this calculator and leave that health insurance. And then you may want to put in here a budget because, you know, the student is wanting, is needing, to go back and forth a few times. You have some transportation costs of $500. You can put in here other costs that, you know, that the student may be incurring during the year, just to make that calculation for you.

And here you'll want to plug in all of the different aid that you received first. We have the gift aid portions. These are the grants that you may have received from school to school. You see, the federal is usually the same at every school. The Federal Student Education Opportunity Grant can vary from school to school.

Some schools don't have any funding for that. Other schools have a lot of funding for that. So they will vary from school to school. State grants and scholarships that can differ whether the student is at a state university or at a private university. That state grant could vary depending on that. But usually if it's going to a state university, those should be the same from school to school.

And then college grants and scholarships. Those are going to vary from school to school quite a bit. So you see here, the scholarships from the institutions, $8,000, $15,000, $10,000, $25,000. That's where you're going to see the most variable. And then if the student has received the outside scholarship, you can put that into the cost calculator as well.

So if they receive a scholarship from their high school through a local organization, you can add that in there, just to make that calculation. And usually those outside scholarships that you receive from the high school or the private organization are portable to any school that the student will choose.

And here you see we've plugged in the different subsidized and unsubsidized loans that the student is eligible for, and some schools have school specific loans that are only available at that certain school. Other schools won't have any type of school specific loans available to students. And here we plug in the work study.

We put that as other resources below the line because this one is deducted right off the bill, but if you have other resources, savings account, so the student has a summer job, you can plug those amounts in here. And then it just gives you a great visual here that you can see what the different annual costs are, what the different gift aid is, what the different student loans are, and what the other resources are. And then you see the remaining costs here from school to school. So it's going to show you that big variation from school to school, what you're seeing, and that could help you really nail down what the difference is in that net price at the schools.

Okay, so once you start comparing those, you want to look at that net price at each school and think about which ones your family can afford. And remember that schools are going to be billing you at one year at a time. You're applying for financial aid one year at a time. You're applying for private loans one year at a time.

But most students are going to be in those programs for four more a year. So consider those costs over four years and how that's going to be affordable. For other students, they may be thinking of graduate school. Their program may require graduate studies. Think about that, adding more years on past four years, and see what you can do about limiting borrowing.

See if you can use those payment plans to make it, take advantage of those payment plans if you can. And see if the student can contribute through savings, and select an affordable college that makes the most sense for you, and think about savings plans that you've already have. If you have a 529 college savings plan, think about how you're going to use that.

Are you going to use all of those funds for the first year? You're going to break those out over four years? Think about the best way to use your savings to help you reach those goals. There's also prepaid tuition plans where you locked in tuition based on the date that you made those deposits.

Savings, bonds, stocks, CDs, student bank accounts, other investments, and don't illustrate those contributions for the family members. If you have a graduation party for a student and they receive gifts from all their family members, they can use some of that to help contribute towards college as well.

That can all help whittle down the amount that you have to borrow. So utilizing savings from a U.Plan or a U.Fund, if you have savings plans with MEFA through the U.Plan or the U.Fund, you can log into those accounts and request a distribution on those. If you have questions, the phone numbers are here for those.

You can set up distribution, set up bill pay, and send the funds directly to colleges all through fidelity.com/savings/529 distributions. If you do have the U.Fund as well, I'm saying if you could consider using that interest free monthly payment plan depending on when you enroll to the hour that you enroll. The more months that you can split that up over from to get the maximum 12 months, usually have to start looking into those payment plans with the schools in late May, early June, so that you can take advantage of that 12-month period.

Other schools don't offer payment plans that early, so you may be able to do a 10-month plan. But if you are in a situation where you're able to make the first payment and you're fine, but then you get to the second payment, that's due in December. And you think, I just can't make that big lump sum payment all at once.

There are a lot of schools that will offer a 5-month payment plan at that point as well that you can roll in and halfway through the year. And there's no credit requirements for these, no interest charges on it. There's a minimal enrollment fee, most of the time it's around $50 to $60 that you pay once to enroll in that plan for the year.

And this is a great option to try to keep the borrowing down and make those payments a little more manageable for you. And you want to check with each college, each college is going to have a little bit different information about their payment plan. So it's going to differ a little bit from school to school.

If you do have to borrow through a private loan to take care of that balance due at the school, be a wise borrower. Look at your credit history. Borrow only what you need. When you're looking at your credit history, make sure that everything on there looks right. If you are a married couple, you can look at who has the better credit rating and have that person be the borrower because usually the interest rate on private loans is tied to how good your credit rating is.

So the better the credit rating that you have is, the better the interest rate that you'll receive. So, choose the person in the family that has a higher credit rating. For some loans, you can use relatives other than parents on that loan to be the co-borrower.

So if you have a grandparent in the situation, or not in the situation, who has a really great credit history and is willing to co-sign on those, they can do so in order to help get a better interest rate on those private loans. For the federal parent loans, it does need to be the parent that's the borrower, so you're not able to do that as well, but the interest rate on the Parent PLUS Loan is not based on credit score.

So it's a little different as well there and borrowing what you need. And again, think of in terms of the total enrollment over the 4 years, what that's going to look like rather than just for that one year. And consider what the major is, what the career is, what the employment rates and starting salary for what the student is studying, and take a look at that.

If the student is not going to be having a high salary after they graduate, you don't want to have a huge loan in the student's that they can't. You want to look at fixed or variable interest rates. Where the fixed rates pursue. What are the variable rates? And what that means is fixed rates are going to stay the same throughout the life of the loan.

Variable rates will show you a range and those can vary depending on what the market conditions are at the time. And you want to look at repayment timelines. There are different repayment options on private loans. So some of them you can make interest only payments while the student is in school.

You can defer the entire payment while the student is in school. You may have a 10-year repayment. There may be a 15-year repayment option So you want to look at all of those and see what the best option is for you. For most education loans, you can make early payments at any time. So if you do opt for one of those interest only or deferred payment, you can make an early payment on that at any time to help keep that interest low.

And if you make multiple credit inquiries within a 45-day period, that only counts as one inquiry. So if you're looking at a few different education loans during that that small 45-day period, that's only going to count as one inquiry.

So if you're trying to shop around and see which interest rate would be best for you from a few different places, you can do that without receiving multiple hits to your credit rating. If you have questions about borrowing, we do have some Comparing College Loan Options webinars. There's one Thursday, June 1st at noon and one Wednesday, July 12th at 6:30.

You can sign up for those on the MEFA website. And I see some questions popping up in the question and answer, and I'll try to hit those at the end of the session.

We also have a MEFA student loan payment calculator. So if you are considering a MEFA loan, this is a great calculator that shows you what your payments are going to look like based on the amount that you borrow. So in this example, the family has borrowed $20,000, and the student is in a four year program, and you see the different amounts there for 10-year repayment with immediate repayment, a 15-year with immediate repayment, interest only while the student is in school, but a 15-year repayment, deferred repayment, meaning that the payment does not become due until after the student leaves school in four years, and that also has a 15-year repayment.

And then there's also a student deferred with co-borrow release with 15 years. What that means is that after a certain amount of on time payments, then the parent can, or relative can, be released from that loan and it's just in the student's name. And you'll see each of those options has a little bit different interest rate on there.

Usually the longer the term, the higher the interest rate is on these loans. And with the co-borrow release, that's going to have the highest interest rate. So keep that in mind when you're deciding between the different interest rates on the shown there for you as well. And also the monthly payments is on there for you.

So it shows you both what the in school monthly payment will look like, and what the post school monthly payment will look like for those deferred payments. And that can help you a lot with your budgeting and seeing what you can afford. Think about what you can afford and see if you can do a combination of borrowing from a student loan if you need to, and doing that monthly payment plan to keep borrowing down if you can, so you don't have to pay back all of that interest over time.

So, let's talk a little bit about that combination strategy that I was just talking about. If you have a balance of $20,000 instead of just taking out a $20,000 loan, have some ways to get that balance down a little. Well, in this case, the student had a summer job or had some savings from either the job that they've had over time, or as they receive gifts from families, they put that into the savings plan and they contribute $1,000 from that savings.

Parents have been thinking about college for a while and had $4,000 put away that they can put towards that. So there's $5,000 that you can use from savings that takes that $20,000 balance down to $15,000. Then the parent decides to enroll in that monthly payment plan, takes another $5,000 off, and now they only have to borrow $10,000 from a loan and have interest accrual on just $10,000 rather than the entire $20,000.

So that's a real helpful way to look at keeping that borrowing down as much as you can. And this is just a different example with the lower balance of $5,000. And you're taking $500 from the student and the parent savings. And make that contribution to the payment plan of $1,500 and then the college loan of just $2,500.

So timing, when does this bill usually become due? Like I said, the fall semester and spring semester are usually two different points at which you're billed. And the fall semester is usually sent in June or July, depending on the school, and is due usually in July or August before the school. And for most schools, you will have to pay that bill in full before the student can begin enrollment.

So you want to apply for those education loans at least two weeks before the bill deadline. For most loans, when you're applying online, you can receive information on if you're approved on the loan very quickly, usually within a day, but allow two weeks for processing so that you can get all of that information.

And if there's additional information that's requested from you for the lender to finalize that loan, so that you can have that loan deducted from the student bill. And you'll have to pay that up front and wait for the proceeds of the loan to come in to be reimbursed to you. And you want to check with the school to see when those payment plans begin according to their schedule.

Because again, that will differ from each school to school. So check with the school to see what their payment plan deadlines are. For private scholarships, this is another way that students can find some money towards their bills. We do have a whole webinar on scholarships that we have a recording of if you want to check on our website as well.

But one of the great places to check for those are the guidance office and school counselors at the school that students attending. Also community organizations, churches, foundations, nonprofits, corporations, they often give out scholarships. There are scholarship searches that you can do for nationwide scholarships.

MEFA Pathway has some scholarships listed, collegeboard.org, Fastweb.com. I will always caution you that when you're out on the internet searching for scholarships to never give out information like social security number on the internet. And also you should never be paying for a scholarship. So students may be receiving emails from organizations saying that they guarantee a scholarship if they pay a certain membership fee.

Unfortunately, those are usually always scams. Never paying for a scholarship. Scholarship companies are in the business of trying to give money or organizations are trying to give money to students to help them with their education, they're not trying to make money off students. So please avoid any of the scholarship offers that are asking for a fee with those scholarships.

Also, if you follow MEFA on social media or sign up for our emails, we do send out information about scholarship information that we have received information about. Some other options that you might have if you're interested. The student is thinking about going to a community college for the first year, or if you're thinking about that, you might not be able to afford that school right away for the first year.

There's a MassTransfer program that's available for students that if you transfer from a community college to a four year school after so many years, it can make it more affordable because they have benefits, including guaranteed credit transfer, tuition credits, freeze on tuition. If you go to mass.edu/masstransfer, they have all the information on that.

Also, as students are looking at public schools outside of Massachusetts in the New England area, there are certain programs that aren't available at Massachusetts state schools and institutions that are available at other New England schools and for some of those programs. There's something called Tuition Break, where the schools will offer a lower tuition costs than the out of state tuition costs normally are at those New England schools and offer a lower rate to students. So if your student is thinking of going to a public school outside of Massachusetts, make sure you look into that Tuition Break to see if the major that they're looking at qualifies for that and if they might be eligible for some of that tuition break funding.

And please also check with your financial aid office if you have questions about the award that you received, if you have questions about what that takes to renew that award, if you have a question about, you may have received an award from one school that looks very different from another school, talk to the financial aid office, see if that they can do anything to help you understand why you received that offer.

Oftentimes the school won't be able to match those offers from one school to another, but they will be able to look at it and explain to you why that offer differs so much from their school to the other school that you may have received that offer from. And they'll also want to take a look and make sure that they have all the information that that other school had when giving that financial aid offer to make sure that everything is available for them to help them out at that school as well.

And talk to the schools and the financial aid office about different circumstances. If you've had a change in circumstances because the FAFSA is based on prior prior year income, there may have been changes in the family circumstances since then, unfortunately, may have lost a job, we had income change. You're working part-time now rather than full time. There are more people in your household. If you may have had a grandparent come live with you, to help with their health problems, they've moved in with you. And so you have more people to take care of. Talk to the financial aid office about that to see if there's any of that information can help you receive more financial aid.

We also just had an appeals webinar in the last couple of weeks. So we have a recording of that as well on our website right now. That will talk to you in depth about what the appeal process looks like. We have experts from many colleges throughout Massachusetts talking about what that process is like on their campus.

Because the appeals process is very different from school to school and you want to call, email, chat, talk to the financial aid office. It's always good to try to talk to them and let them know about your circumstances, let them know about any concerns that you might have. I always say, I was in this field for 30 years and I always like to get to know the students and the families.

Because sometimes there are scholarships that would come across my desk that would have very specific criteria from donors that they're looking for. Someone that has an interest in creative writing, they're looking for someone that works doing community service, they want someone that plays the tuba.

There's, there's all kinds of strange donor requests that come in. And the more I know about a student, the better I can, as a financial aid officer, help line that information up with the scholarships that that may be available to them. So it's good to let the financial aid offices know a little bit about you if you can.

So what's next? You want to make sure by May 1st that you're paying those enrollment deposits, usually to one school, the first choice. After you've made that decision of which school is right for the student, create a plan to pay the balance. Use MEFA as your resource. We have a lot of webinars coming up over the next few weeks and months to help families out.

So please sign up for our emails. Use our free calculators on our website. Look at our blogs, listen to the MEFA podcast to get some more information. You can email us or call us at any time. We do one on one appointments too with families, so you can go to mefa.org/appointment-request and we'll meet with you free of charge just to look at if you have some questions about comparing college to college, what those financial aid awards look like, if you need some advice as to how to borrow, what you should borrow, what that looks like, we're happy to meet with you one on one and talk to you about that.

There are no obligations and that's all free of charge. We do have that Comparing College Loan Options coming up. If you use that, the code there, that QR code, you can sign up for that webinar right there. And I'm just going to start taking a look at the questions and see if I can go through those.

The family expected contribution to the actual cost is a wide gap. Do you have any wiggle room to get closer to the expected family contribution? So not all schools are able to meet the full need of students, meaning that they are able to meet the cost minus the expected family contribution. And there may be some gaps in there.

Oftentimes, that's where you have to borrow for private loans or use those monthly payment plans. But also you can give a call to the financial aid office. See if there's anything additional available to you from the school for options. If they can take a second look for you. Again, if you have circumstances have changed since you've applied, let them know about that.

But some schools just don't have the funding to fill full needs. So there will be a gap there. Some schools, other schools, they do full need. And the question, what happens if your credit isn't that great, can you still get a loan? So for the Parent PLUS Loan program, the credit score and the credit rating isn't as stringent as they look at as a lot of other private loan programs.

So sometimes that's your best option. If you don't have great credit, you can also look at having a co-signer on that loan that does have good credit. And then that may make you eligible for that loan, if you apply with that cosigner.

And I have another question, that if there are two members of the family making payments to cover the tuition and board, can you send payments individually, or do they require that you get only one payment. You can make as many payments from as many sources if you want for a school bill. You don't have to pay that all in one payment.

If you can coordinate that in some way just to make sure that no one is paying more than what is actually due at the school and make sure that the entire bill is paid at the end of the day. You want to make sure of that. If you do end up paying more than the actual bill that is due, they will refund that money to the family.

But it usually goes back in the student's name, so you want to just coordinate that so that the student doesn't get a big windfall that they weren't expecting and spend that without letting you know that they received that money back. So you want to just check to make sure that payments are applied properly.

So another question is the child will have enough of a trust to pay for two years, and then we'll need financial help for the next two years. What would you recommend, to pay in full for two years and then take out loans, or spend up the trust money over four years? So what I recommend that you take a look at with that is use some of those calculators to show what your loan payments are going to be, what the cost over time is if you take out a loan in smaller amounts over four years or more over the next two years, over the last two years. Look at those calculators and see what the bottom line is. See what the interest that you're going to have to pay on those loans. And make the decision based on that.

So there was a, someone said they used a college affordability calculator that asks the whole value that the primary resident was shielded from consideration for financial aid. So, for federal financial aid on the FAFSA, you do not have to put the value of your primary home on there, but some private schools do ask information about the whole value on the CSS Profile.

And they will include the family home value within determining the need for their institutional scholarships for federal grants. The primary home is not included, but for some institutional grants, they do take into consideration the cost of the primary home, but that's going to differ from school to school.

So for most student loans, they have a question, what is the longest that a student loan is for? So the longest period for federal loans is 25 years of repayments. For most private loans, they tend to be 10 to 15 years. But again, you can take a look at those private loans and see what their payment options are.

And thank you, we will be sending out information with a recording of this webinar and within the next few days, you can also follow us on social media. And if you have any other questions, you can please email us, contact us, call us. We'll always do our best to help. I hope you have a great evening. Thank you.