Determining how much money you need to afford college can be a difficult and stressful task due to the many different expenses you must consider. College financial aid calculators make the task more manageable by listing the various expenses a college student incurs as well as helping to calculate how much money might be available to assist the student in paying for their education. There are a number of websites that have them for you as long as you know use a college financial aid calculator.
Instructions
1. Find a website with a calculator for you to use. A number of different websites that provide information about college financial aid have calculators. Many college students use FinAid, which is a college website sponsored by the job board, Monster (see Resources).
2. Choose a short or long financial aid calculator. There are two different versions of calculators you can use to determine your expenses and the financial aid available to you. While both provide an estimate, the long calculator requires the input of more data, which in turn gives you a better estimate than the short one. However if you don't have much time and want to see a rough estimate, the short financial aid calculator is much easier, since it only asks a few questions.
3. Select either federal or institutional methodology. Which of these options you choose will depend upon where you are going to school. Public institutions generally use the federal methodology to determine what kind of aid you receive, thus you will want to select this when you use the college financial aid calculator if going to a public community college or state university. Those that attend a private college will want to use the institutional methodology since this is similar to how private schools award aid.
4. Mark whether you are a dependent or independent student. To be considered an independent student, there are certain qualifications you must meet, such as being married, having children or being over the age of 23. Having your own place and paying for school yourself does not instantly make you an independent student. You can determine which category you fall into by completing the dependency status worksheet on the FAFSA (Free Application for Federal Student Aid) website.
5. Select your enrollment status. Financial aid is awarded differently for students that go full-time versus part-time. Full-time is considered 12 hours or more, while part-time is anything from 6 to 11 hours. Taking less than 6 credit hours does not qualify you for financial aid, thus you may need to adjust your enrollment if you need financial aid to pay for any classes you take.
6. Input information about your household and family status. Being married, having children, or simply having other siblings in college at the same time you attend can all affect the amount of financial aid you receive. Generally students receive more money for school when they have others in their family in college at the same time or have people dependent upon them, such as in the case of having children.
7. Supply parent information if you are a dependent. When using the financial aid calculator to determine how much school will cost and what aid you can expect to receive, you will have to put your parents' tax and income information into the calculator to get a true estimate if you are a dependent. Eliminating this information on the calculator won't provide you with the right estimate. If you are classified as an independent student, you can skip this step.
8. Enter your tax information. Each student, regardless of independent or dependent, is required to enter his tax and income information into the calculator. If using the short version, you can simply estimate while you should take out the tax forms you filed if using the long financial aid calculator.
9. Estimate the costs associated with school. At the end of the financial aid calculator, you will have the opportunity to estimate how much it will cost for you to attend school. There are numerous categories of costs such as tuition, books, room and board, health insurance, transportation and even entertainment. You should enter information that is based on the school you are planning to attend.
10. Compute the information and get your results. After entering all the information, you can have the financial aid calculator analyze and assess it. Then it will provide you with the results of what you can expect college to cost as well as what approximate aid will be available to assist you.
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