FAFSA

That's FAFSA, not FASFA. FASFA sounds better, and it works just as well in Google, so maybe it doesn't matter. Not sure just what all the letters in FAFSA stand for, but the last three stand for Federal Student Aid, i.e. money for college. I looked into this a couple of years ago, but all I found was a bunch of yahoos telling me to fill out this gawd awful form and send it in. No indication if I (or more properly, my kids) would qualify for a grant or not. I could just see filling out this form that looks even worse than a Federal Income Tax form, digging out all the required financial information (how much do you have? how much did your dog make? are you now or have you ever been a member of the triple A?), filling in all the blanks, dotting all the i's, crossing all the t's, mailing it in and getting a response in 6 months that says, no you don't get no stinking money because your dog made more than a dollar and a half back in ought nine. It sounded like a giant cluster foo.

And I don't care about student loans, I don't want no stinking loans. That's the last thing anyone needs. But I've been out of work for a while, and my wife was making some noises, so I said I would look into it again, and I finally did.

This time I found an on-line estimator that lets you fill in a few blanks and comes back with your "Expected Family Contribution" (EFC). From this it looks like I've been contributing more than my share, so maybe we would qualify for a grant, so maybe it would be worthwhile to fill out the stupid form and mail it in. The glass-half-full part of me says probably not, but my better half will disagree. So it looks like I've got some paperwork to do. Bah.

I also found a link to a federal page that had the government's actual rules for calculating eligibility, but the link is dead. Stupid bureaucrats. Probably just as well. I imagine it is probably as opaque as the page describing Abby's Military grade Tom-Tom.

I'll let you know if this ever pans out.