The Free Application for Federal Student Aid is one of the most complicated processes you will encounter when beginning your college journey. However, it  also absolutely crucial if you are concerned about paying for your education. To put it simply, FAFSA is the process the US government has set up to evaluate a student’s financial needs and what aid they may receive in order to pay for their schooling.

There are some smaller but important tips you should know about when filling out FAFSA. For instance, you need to be using black ink, you should leave boxes blank to indicate a space between words, only include the dollar amount of any financial figures, and don’t leave any blank spaces. While some of these might seem obvious, it is important that you take the time to learn this to ensure that these small details do not trip you up. From that point, your primary mission is to accurately report your family’s financial situation in order to be connected to financial options that suit your needs.

To be clear, FAFSA itself does not necessarily mean you will be taking out loans in order to pay for school. FAFSA can point you toward other options such as scholarships, grants, and work study programs as well as student loans. Each of these will affect you in different ways, but the simple explanation of each is this: grants and scholarships are money that is given to you and does not need to be repaid, work-study means you are earning the money to pay for your college, and loans are money that is borrowed that will eventually need to be repaid, typically with interest.  

Loans have become something of a boogeyman in the world of college applications. I’m sure you’ve heard some of the horror stories of students being buried under debt becoming more and more commonplace and the national student debt having exceeded 1 trillion (yes, trillion) dollars. This, understandably, has many students concerned about how they will pay off such loans after they have completed college. There are a number of ways to deal with this, and loan forgiveness is a helpful program that you should definitely inquire about should loans be necessary to pay for your schooling. In order to help with this, a link has been attached below that leads to the federal financial aid site for loan forgiveness. Good luck and to read more informative and helpful articles, please take a moment to subscribe to our page to receive notifications for our weekly blog.

For additional information regarding FAFSA, follow this link;

‍https://studentaid.ed.gov/sa/repay-loans/forgiveness-cancellation/public-service