Maximizing Your Financial Aid

It’s time to start anew semester. I decided to update a post on getting the most financial aid. If you have any suggestions, please leave some tips in the comments.

How to Reduce Student Loans

• Consider using CLEP to reduce costs.

I used my college’s tuition prices to figure the savings from using CLEP before and this is what I came up with:

Here’s the amount of savings:

• Apply for FAFSA early. As soon as you can, apply for Free Application for Federal Student Aid in January. Use an estimate for your taxes when you initially fill it out. Once you get your tax return back, (or your parents’) sign in online and update the information. The earlier you do this the higher your chances of receiving more grants. Contact your local school to see the deadline.
• Be aware of individual states’ deadlines for getting financial aid. Each state has a different deadline on getting grants from them. March is a deadline that many states shoot for, so try to do it early and you’ll see that you can get more grants there. We’re talking about an extra hundred a semester to thousands of dollars.
• Apply for scholarships. Just because you’re getting money from the government doesn’t mean you can’t try to get some scholarships. FastWeb is a popular site that searches applicable scholarships for you. You should also check out the institution’s scholarships, which are usually based on need, merit, and/or major. There are plenty of sites where you can dig for money for college. It pays to leave no stone unturned.
• Stay local. By staying in-state, you get much cheaper rates than out of state students. In my first economic class, the professor stated that the university charged twice as much for out of state students. I just checked the tuition rates today. It’s almost three times as much as in-state now.
• Go to a community college first. In my area, the community college is close to the local universities. Many of the university professors teach at community college. You also save 40-60% on the price per credit!
• Maintain good grades. Most federal financial aid require a 2.0 GPA or higher to keep it. Don’t use that as a guideline; strive for a 3.0 or higher. It will help when you go to a 4 year university and are looking at their scholarships.
• Consider work study as an option. This helps put cash on your pocket and the schedule is typically good for a college student. If you have dependents and going to college, this may not be an option, as the pay is usually $6-8/hour.  I would suggest looking at jobs from the career center.

Don’t let barriers like how much time it takes stop you. You have to invest time to increase your chance of getting a great financial aid package.

Photo Credit:  paolo màrgari

• Rich College Student: Debt Repayment Welcome carnival visitors! If this is your first time here, please look around and leave your feed back. If you like what you see, please add this site to your feed. Monday is when I post my Rich College Student Series. Please check my archives in the BEST OF......
• Upside of the Credit Crunch for Students This is a guest post from Steve Sildon, Senior Editor for CreditCardAssist.com, who is a frequent contributor in the personal finance community on the subject of student loans, student credit cards, and financial responsibility for young people. Personal Finance for College Students The recent state of the economy has been......

• Should You Pay for Your Child's College Education? Paying for college for yourself or for a child can drop you into debt faster than many other things. Aside from huge disasters like medical emergencies or a home fire, more people get into higher debt by paying for college than any other reason. The best advice for long term......
• Learn from Your Money Mistakes - Identify Them If you are determined to have a better financial year in 2010 than you did in 2009, it would help to learn from what went wrong. The best way to provide that learning is to carefully and deliberately look back at your 2009 finance activity. This can be painful, sort......