Paying for College Without Going Broke, 2010 Edition (College Admissions Guides)

I have been buying this for over 10 years now.
It has saved us 1,000's of dollars no doubt!
Can't say enough good things about it.
The colleges' best friends are the uneducated consumers, those parents who don't bother to learn HOW the process works! Putting 4 children through college in 11 consecutive years, this book helps!

How much do you hate filling out the FASFA? I hate it every year. It is a mystery and almost worse than doing my taxes.

I dove into the FASFA two years ago, all on my own, no instructions for my son's freshman year at a fairly expensive private college. We did reasonably well on financial aid. This past year, I purchased this book and used the section by section guide to fill in the FASFA, and like magic, we qualified for $1,000 more financial aid this year. Now this is remarkable, the college cost went up a fair amount, and my wife and I both made more money over last year. I credit this book to receiving more financial aid. There are some counter-intuitive things you need to include in the FASFA that you might consider money that would reduce aid, but in fact does the opposite. The author does a fantastic job of explaining the ins and outs of that form. They were things I missed by not fully understanding the FASFA instructions.

Frankly, I wish we had...Read more

I found the book to be useful, and it did introduce me to a few subjects I have not considered previously. However, a good deal of the information was not new to me and seemed pretty simplistic. Maybe I am better prepared than average, but I suspect the book is oriented toward the lowest common denominator. I will probably purchase the new version once I get a couple of years closer to paying the college bills for my first child. My main take-away from the book is that middle-class families will struggle to pay for college pretty much no matter what we do, we can only reduce the pain a little by planning.