[...] wrote a review of an article on scholarships and financial aid. Everyone with children needs to read this post to help plan for what could be a huge [...]

I would like to add, though, that many good students looking to go to college are not in the top 1% of their class and won’t get nice scholarships to pay everything.

A good topic for articles might be what to do if your child doesn’t get academic scholarships, what options are there based on need?

I have a handful of friends with sophomores and juniors, who hired a local financial advisor who specializes in the rules of financial aid. He worked with them to redo their income and assets to minimize what they, as parents, are expected to pay.

For instance, one of my friends had put quite a bit of money in her daughter’s name to save money on taxes or something. Apparently, you can be heavily penalized for this in the aid formula. Who would know that, right?!

Anyway, Brent helped her and her husband reduce their share from $23,000 per year to just $3800! The colleges all made very generous offers for aid to meet their need.

All my other girl friends who hired him mentioned similar results. When it was all said and done, their kids will be going to really nice private schools for little more than our local community college would have cost.

Will definitely hire him when my son is in high school!

We have 3 young children in line and we intend to try our best for them to seek the benefits of financial aid for their tertiary education.