Arghh! I had this great answer and when I tried to post it, the site went down, at least for me. My original post is somewhere in orbit.
Suffice it to say, thank you guys so much for the input! I’m gonna nag her butt to death on Monday to DO SOMETHING that you guys have suggested. She’s still in the stage of, “Butt out, Mom — I will handle this myself.” And yet she hasn’t. We want her to go back to school in September and finish in two years. You’d think working a mind-numbing boring clerical job that she hates for the last three summers would be a real incentive. OTOH, while she is a procrastinator like me and her dad, she actually has a “five-year plan.” Always has. In two years, she wants to work at a hospital in Santa Monica that offers student-loan-payment assistance. (Yikes! Living and working in the Westside with its traffic and such. I guess when you’re in your early 20s, you have the energy and the need to be “where it’s at.” We can barely remember that, although the two of us did that in So. Orange County in ancient times.)
For those encouraging us to do FAFSA, we always do it as soon as possible…you really have to do it before March 1st and we did…just as soon as all the W-2s and 1099s came in.
Don’t know if you’re aware of it, but even if you disown your kid or stop claiming him/her as a dependent, the kid’s parents have to file FAFSA until the kid is 25 or older, unless the parents are too disabled to work. I don’t think I saw it on this blog, but on another, where a poster whose parents were upper middle class, was shown the door at age 18…”You’re on your own, son,” evem though he had good grades and was in no way a troublemaker. He had friends in a similar predicament. They couldn’t get help from the feds or the state. This particular poster worked manual/retail jobs till he was 26, then was able to apply to FAFSA on his own. He got a graduate degree and, in his early 30s now, is doing just fine.
