January is financial wellness month, so we thought it would be good to talk about paying for college. There are so many resources available to you, so here are some helpful sites to get you started. 
- CollegeBoard.com: This site is a one stop shot for all things college planning. On this site, you can see how much the average college is, what financial aid is available to you, and the best places to find scholarships.
- Scholarship America: Scholarship America is the nation’s premier scholarship and educational support service organization. This site posts scholarships and offers advice to your student on how to make the most of their scholarship applications.
- Savingforcollege.com: A super easy to use site that explains different savings options. This site does a great deep dive into 529 Plan.
We know that paying for college can be stressful, but hopefully these resources can ease a bit of the burden.
StudentAid.com offers the only service that accurately calculates and compares a student’s financial aid eligibility and out-of-pocket costs (net prices) of any of 6,500 colleges BEFORE students apply. With it, students and their families have the essential information tailored to their academic and financial circumstances to determine which colleges are the best fit for the student’s career goals and the family bank account.
Here’s how works. A student chooses as many as 10 colleges and provides their academic information along with some of the same income and asset data needed for the federal student aid application. Then, StudentAid.com’s powerful algorithms of state, federal, and college aid formulas accurately calculate the student’s aid eligibility and net price for each college chosen.
Students receive their free, customized College Cost & Planning Report with an easy-to-read, side-by-side aid eligibility and net price comparison that details how much in grants, work-study, and loans a student is eligible to receive. The comparison even shows what monthly loan payments would be for each college considered.
Created like a workbook, each College Cost & Planning Report also includes a custom planning timeline, detailed college profiles with often hard-to-find facts like retention and graduation rates, and personalized information about grants and tax breaks a student (or their family) is qualified to receive. To ensure its net price calculations are accurate, StudentAid.com tested them with 25 million test cases and 28,000 real families.
Under the Access for All program supported by USA Funds, the College Cost & Planning Report is free to low-income students (household income of less than $40,000).
Be Realistic!
If you are a middle class family with 2 hard working parents that earn a combined income of between 50-100,000 a year, don’t even waste your time applying for scholarships.(Oh, you may be thinking that isa lot of money, but try surviving in CA with a house payment, car payments and medical for elderly sick parents…) My daughter had a 4.0, taken 4 Ap classes throughout high school and applied for over 30 scholarships! She never received one! Also, she got accepted into the UC school system but when we couldn’t afford the fees and loans we were told “okay.” So it is not true that colleges help you no matter what!!! She is now working and attending community college and hopes to be able to afford to transfer. But who knows???
The applications for scholarships are laborious and a waste of time not to mention false Hope!!