Reviewing your Financial Aid Award (FAA) can take some time, but it will be easy with these steps:

First, figure out the deadline to accept your financial aid and add it to your calendar.

Next, set aside time before the deadline to look over your award. Then, calculate the numbers! 
Finally, get your hands on 2 docs:

• your actual FAA letter/form (if you don’t know where it is, check your student portal and email)
• our financial aid walkthrough worksheet, which has a shortlink so you can download it easily on another device: b12my.co/FARW

Now you’re ready to get started.

We’ve tried to pull together all the info you’ll need into one place, but it’s also a lot of info! Don’t be alarmed, let’s break it down. 

The worksheet has 5 tabs:

1.  the main financial aid review worksheet, where you fill out your info
2.  an example (pretend) student’s FAR worksheet
3.  a budget helper worksheet, to figure out how much money you actually need
4.  a tab with links to cost of attendance, the financial aid office, and main work-study pages for some of the colleges most often attended by MyCoach users
5.  other useful links & tips

Your financial aid is calculated based on the difference between your expected family contribution (EFC) and the cost of attendance (COA).

Your EFC is an index number used by your school to calculate how much financial aid you are eligible to receive. Your COA is an estimated annual school cost, including tuition & living expenses. These can usually be found on your financial aid award. Your financial aid offers will be on the award, too. Usually it’s broken down into grants/scholarships, work-study money, and loans.

Find your EFC:

• on your financial aid award
• on your student aid report (SAR) from FAFSA

Find your COA:

• on your financial aid award
• by searching your college’s website or financial aid pages

Now let’s transfer all of this info onto the worksheet.

This is a good time to verify that the amounts listed on your expected family contribution and your cost of attendance are correct.

Remember, when you filled out the FAFSA, you or your parents indicated what your family income, assets, and debts were. These may have changed.

Or you may have higher living expenses than what your school considers your COA.

Check the budget helper tab of our FAR worksheet to help you break down your expected actual living expenses and family contribution.

If there are big discrepancies, you may want to ask your school for additional financial aid. Learn more about that, and how to ask, here.

Now you’ll identify how much of your financial aid award you want to accept. In general:

• grants/scholarships are free money
• work study covers your paycheck for a work study job; learn more here.
• loans have to be paid back with interest

Typically, students accept all grant/scholarship and work-study aid they’re offered. The category that has wiggle-room is loans. You might need to accept all the loans you’re offered, but it’s always better to avoid debt if you can. On the other hand, student loan debt is a lot better than credit-card debt, so it’s better to take out more loans if that prevents you from borrowing money in other ways.

If you don’t need to use all the loan money you’re offered, accept subsidized government loans first and unsubsidized government loans second. This is the “student loan debt” being referred to when people talk about the government forgiving student loan debt.

If you’ve been following along on the worksheet, you’ll see that it’s helping you do the math. Find the sweet spot where that last cell turns green: that’s probably the amount of financial aid you’ll want to accept. Make sure to let your school know, and then you’re all set.