2012 Taxes

I just got off the phone with our tax lady. She is very informative and helpful. We really like her, she's a farm girl too.

Any way she told me that the IRS is not accepting any and will reject any forms submitted that have Education Credits until further notice probably until mid March they think. So we can't file our taxes until we get this notice saying that it's permissable. We also applied for FASFA for our daughter's education (don't expect to get any assistance there) and that has to be filed promptly before the money is gone. So everything is on a stand still. Doesn't make sense. FAFSA is financial aid that the schools encourage everyone to apply for if you have a son or daughter starting or going to college. Seems if you have one too many assets don't plan on getting any assistance.


Makes you wonder what this world is coming to.

Farmers never qualify for that stuff, we tend to be asset rich and cash poor, it would be as if you work a factory job but they take the asset value of your factory as an asset you could spend......

What are we farmers supposed to do, sell of 3 acres every now and then to cover the bills?

As a farmer you can't file until march anyhow for most, some forum won't be done until mid march because the tax laws were passed so late.

What a mess.

Paul

File your taxes without that benefit and then file an amended return later.

Paul, we're not farmers but do own ground.

It just seems stupid. They want you to apply for FAFSA at midnight on Jan 1st. to get your name in the pot for the allotted money before it runs out, now they tell us you can't file... such BS.

The whole truth is they (the government) don't know what's going on themselves.

My wife worked out the numbers on our tax returns yesterday. When she did the state taxes, it came out that they would owe us $2.

She wondered if the state will even write a check for $2. Near the bottom of the form there is a list of agencies and charities that you can donate a refund to so I told her to give the $2 to Arizona Wildlife.

Feds owe us a lot more.

Just simplify by eliminating FAFSA for everyone. Shouldn't be spending mine and the other 52% whom pay Federal Income tax on this pork laden handout.

John B.,

If you work and if you own anything, your daughter will not get any financial aid whatsoever.

We looked into in when our oldest daughter graduated from high school. College financial aid guy said that she could get a loan at an interest rate of over 18%. I literally said to him, "What the heck? She could just open a major credit card and put her college education on the card at those rates! And at least she'd be earning rewards points back on dollars spent."

We did not expect a handout as we work decent jobs and own property...we had just hoped she would be able to get a somewhat low-interest loan so she could afford the payments (because we expect our kids to pay their own way through college).

Yet I have an unmarried niece over age 30 who has never ever worked a full time job - has two kids by different dads... and she has had the G O V hand her all sorts of money from rent assistance to daycare assistance to foodstamps and medical assistance. It pays for her to work very little!

I resent that a low life niece gets all that for free... but our daughter cannot get a loan with a reasonable interest rate though we have worked our tails off all our life and paid plenty into the system.

You are right - what is the world coming to?

Financial aid is/ was not available for my kids. They applied for multiple grants and got a few 100 here and there. I am just at the point where I make too much to be eligible but not near enough to pay for it.

It is available to the Americans born here to illegal parents. Usually in the form of grants they don't have to pay back.

I believe the main reason that college tuition is so high is because of the FAFSA and other government funded subsidies (yes, this is a welfare state). Colleges can raise their tuition as high as they want. They will get their money one way or another because the government will keep chipping in. And the consequence is that colleges have gone from being barely affordable to unaffordable for a lot more people.

For anyone wanting to earn a bachelor's degree, I recommend attending a relatively affordable community college for 2-3 years to earn college credits, then transfer to a good 4-year college or university that will accept the credits to finish earning the bachelors. The money saved will be huge.

We are just begining.

Heaven forbid it should be a little difficult to get a handout. You should be able to walk down there, fill out a form, and walk out with 10,000 in cash, free external_link money. Oh wait. It's not his money, It's ours.

The deal with FAFSA is that it's a prerequisite for pretty much any other financial aid application. So even if your daughter is eligible for a private scholarship, she probably has to complete the FAFSA (and possibly get rejected) before her scholarship application would get considered. The idea is that federal needs-tested financial assistance kicks in first, that way other financial aid goes to students who might not qualify for federal assistance.

I'm all for blaming a guy for something he's responsible for, but the FAFSA is not an external_link handout.

I filled out the FAFSA form for the first time in January of 1992. You can't even blame Clinton for it, because he hadn't even been sworn in yet.

Being on an asset-rich, cash-poor farm, my folks didn't get much assistance either. Probably about the same as what you get now. College was a lot less expensive back then, though, so the money went a lot farther.

Nothing's changed. We just think it's worse now because we're peppered with it 24/7.

21 years ago we had three channels, five if the weather was just right, no internet, no cell phones, 30 minutes of local news at 6PM, 30 minutes of national news at 6:30. You didn't know what was going on in the rest of the world.

(quoted from post at 06:58:12 02/05/13) The deal with FAFSA is that it's a prerequisite for pretty much any other financial aid application. So even if your daughter is eligible for a private scholarship, she probably has to complete the FAFSA (and possibly get rejected) before her scholarship application would get considered. The idea is that federal needs-tested financial assistance kicks in first, that way other financial aid goes to students who might not qualify for federal assistance.

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FAFSA is just the common form used by colleges to ascertain a student (and their parents) financial status. The actual decision on aid comes from the individual college's Financial Aid office. Obviously, the Aid office has to follow federal guidelines on aid that comes from federal funds so this will be pretty standard across the country. A student will generally qualify for a mix of Aid. Grants/Scholarships are pretty tough to get and comprise a smaller portion of the Aid. The rest is made up from loans. .

There are 2 main types of loans(subsidized and unsubsidized). The Stafford loan is the name for one of them.

There are also non-college or non-government scholarships that a student can apply for. One of my daughters got a $ 2500 scholarship thru the state Equestrian Hunter/Jumper Association.

The FAFSA also determines what the "family contribution" should be. When our oldest (first daughter) first applied in 2000, the FAFSA said our family contribution should be $ 26,000/yr. My eyes bugged out because I didn't have over $100,000 in the bank to contribute to a 4 year education for my daughter. We helped her out and she made it thru undergrad and law school mostly on loans which she is paying off now.

All 3 of our daughters made it thru college and have LARGE loans (2 of them that went on to Law School have loans in the $150k-200k range, but earned close to $200k as a starting salary when done).

Yes, college is expensive, but if it is a step toward a professional career, it is well worth the expense. If a person is going to college because it's what is expected and ends up with a degree that has limited market potential (e.g. philosophy or women's studies) and has no idea what they want to be, then college will not be a financially wise decision.