Financial Aid For College – 3 New Year’s Resolutions to Help You Get Financial Aid For Your Kids
Have you made your New Year’s Resolutions yet? Do you have kids headed for college? Read on for the perfect way to combine the two.
Your goal should be to pay as little as possible out of your own pocket for your kids’ education. Ideally, your child should get financial aid or scholarships for college.
But you make too much, you say? That’s what “they” want you to believe. As it turns out, they’re not quite right. There are a few things you can do to get financial aid for college after all.
And that’s where New Year’s Resolutions come in… If you have one or more kids headed to college in the foreseeable future, the following three New Year’s resolutions are ones you’ll definitely want to keep. After all, they could save you thousands of dollars and mean the difference between a depleted retirement account and a nice big nest egg:
1) Educate yourself
Get the real facts, not just the information that the school guidance counselors give you, or the pamphlets from the college financial aid office. Their resources are very limited. The guidance counselors simply aren’t trained as financial advisors and don’t know the alternative solutions. And by the time they are talking to the kids and their families, it’s usually too late to help them with most of these strategies anyway.
So resolve to take responsibility for investigating ALL your options. Find out what you need to do to get financial aid and scholarship money. Also resolve not to believe everything you hear from guidance counselors.
2) Take action right now
Your next resolution should be to start learning all about getting financial aid for college right now. It’s crucial to start planning as early as possible.
If your kids are seniors in high school, it may be too late for most options (but not all). On the flip side, if they’re in middle school or freshmen in high school, you will have plenty of opportunities to position yourself and your family for maximum aid and/or scholarship money.
That’s because becoming eligible for financial aid for college might involve some very careful planning and financial maneuvering — and that can take time. Specifically, you’ll need to turn assets that are counted towards eligibility for financial aid into assets that are not, such as certain types of life insurance.
In addition, your kids will have time to add certain activities to their schedule, from social service to playing chess to sports to getting involved in leadership activities. Any of those could pay off in big scholarship money as well — especially social service.
Traditional leadership and sports activities are not counting as much as volunteer work in the allotment of academic scholarships. You’ll want to keep abreast of what schools are looking for in awarding scholarships as part of your planning for financial aid for college.
3) Get the right kind of help Don’t count on the financial aid officers to help you. Or even your regular financial advisor. He may just give you a savings plan that will help you scrimp and save to pay for the expenses yourself — or worse yet, steer you toward the failed 529 plan.
Instead, find a wealth management advisor who has experience with helping wealthy families get college funding. Most regular financial advisors don’t know about all the secrets that are involved in moving your assets out of categories that are counted and into categories that don’t count towards financial aid.
So if you’re ready to keep your New Year’s resolutions about getting financial aid for college, claim access to wealth management advisor Thomas Quinlin’s FREE webinar on outside-of-the-box college funding strategies.
Thomas Quinlin, who rides his Harley all over the world, shows people how to live pre-tax in a post-tax world by helping them find financial solutions that go far beyond the traditional approaches: http://www.lifestyledesigngroupintl.com.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Thomas_Quinlin
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