Michelle answers:

Go to
www.fafsa.ed.gov/

Once you load the page you should see a box with a green heading

Click on the link that says

“Fill out your FAFSA”

Once it loads choose the year you’d like to file

If your planning to go to school in the summer file 08-09.
If your planning to go to school in the fall file ’09-’10

After that,

Just follow the directions

Michelle answers:

Asimusb:

The FAFSA is filled out only once each year, and submitted to the US Department of Education. It’s the Department of Education that evaluates your application, and they use the information that you provide to calculate a special index known as your Expected Family Contribution, or EFC.

When you complete the FAFSA, there’s a question that asks where you want the Department to send your “ISIR”, the Institutional Student Information Report. If you took the SAT or the ACT, you might remember doing this on that application as well – you told the College Board where to send your test results – you do the same thing with the FAFSA – tell the Department of Education where to send your EFC score.

Just like with the test results, you can change your mind later, and ask the Department to send your EFC to other schools – you can go back to the FAFSA website, enter your PIN, and add new schools to the list.

So – complete the FAFSA only once, but do it once every year. If you’ve applied to several schools, and you’re not sure where you’re going yet, have the Department of Education send your report to all of them. If you want to add more schools later, all you’ll need is the school code. The Department will take care of the rest.

By the way, once your school receives the ISIR, it’s the financial aid office that determines what forms of aid you qualify for. You’ll receive an “aid offer letter”, letting you know what kinds of aid you are being offered, and how much.

Good luck – I hope this helped.

Michelle answers:

First make sure you know when the financial aid deadlines are for all the colleges you think you may attend. I believe there’s one deadline for the Federal money and then individual schools may have their own deadlines. The money you may receive from the FAFSA is on a first come-first served basis this is per college/university and per school (since you may not only qualify for federal money, you could qualify for money from your school.So the deadlines are important) Ok, now on to your question….No, you don’t have to fill out another FAFSA, ideally you will have some idea of the university you may want to attend and then put that school code in the FAFSA when it asks you. If you fill your FAFSA out online there will be a section asking you where you want to send your FAFSA and then you will just enter the school codes there (they provide you with the code and you can enter several). Pretty much you can do that every year or you can do it the year before you transfer. When you put in the school codes of the university you want to attend, the Dept of Education will automatically send your info to that school.

Michelle answers:

Fill out the FAFSA January 1 of the year you will need it or as close to then as possible but not earlier than that. Because Jan 1 is when the government puts all the financial aid out there for students to apply for. In the beginning there is a lot and they give more, as time goes on from that date its starts to get taken and it gets less and less.

Also dont wait to do those taxes. You can do an estimate FAFSA which is what my daughters college suggested. She is attending now Fall 2010. January 1, 2010 we used our previous years taxes from 2008 and did the FAFSA as an estimate. Then as soon as we got our w2 from our jobs we did the 2009 taxes and then we went on the FAFSA home page in #3 where it says make corrections and we edited our FAFSA and resent it with the tax information from 2009. There is a question on the FAFSA that says if it is an estimate one. This way they are already preparing your award package of aid early which is better.

It goes by income and assets of you and your family so if you qualify you will get aid, however, doing so early you will get more than if you do your FAFSA late.