She Got Zero From NYU. The Problem Was One Number.

A woman came to me genuinely upset. Her daughter had been admitted to a good list of schools, NYU among them.

The aid offers came back at zero.

Not small. Zero. Nothing. Nada.

She ran a successful contracting business, she's sharp, she'd filled out the forms herself, and she could not understand what had gone wrong. She hired me essentially to look over her shoulder. I told her honestly I couldn't promise anything.

I found it almost immediately.

She had reported what her business was actually worth.

That sounds like the correct thing to do. In the real world it is the correct thing to do. On the FAFSA it's the wrong number, because the FAFSA does not define business value the way you and your accountant do. For most families, the value of a business they own is treated as zero on the FAFSA.

She had equipment. She had real assets. She had a real, valuable company. And none of that was supposed to go on that form.

So we corrected the figure, and my wife Pearl refiled the applications to NYU, Syracuse and the rest, with a letter explaining that we'd made an error on the original filing. A couple of schools came back with clarifying questions, which is normal.

The result: zero became $25,000 a year.

It held for three years running. Seventy five thousand dollars, from fixing one number.

I want to be precise about something, because this is the part people get wrong when they repeat it. This is not about shading the truth or being clever. It's the opposite. The form asks a specific question with a specific legal definition behind it, and she had answered a different question. Correcting it made her filing more accurate, not less.

That's the whole lesson. The financial aid formulas do not run on real-world logic. They run on their own definitions, and if you answer using common sense instead of the definition, you lose money you were entitled to.

Here's a second one, going the other direction.

Another client, still with us, owns a high end pizzeria out in Oregon. Their son got into an expensive private school. Their income was decent, and the award reflected that: about $18,000.

We wanted more.

That school requires the CSS Profile, which, unlike the FAFSA, does consider business value. So the appeal I wrote made a specific argument: we think you're overvaluing this business. Yes, you can see revenue. Yes, you can see equipment. What you cannot see on the form is the equipment loans against it. If this family sold the business tomorrow, they'd walk away with nothing. Liabilities exceed assets.

None of that gets disclosed anywhere on a financial aid application. You have to raise it yourself.

They came back with almost $10,000 more in free money, plus a $2,000 zero percent loan, which is effectively free money too.

Roughly $12,000, for writing one letter.

If you own a business and you filled out these forms yourself, or handed them to a CPA who does excellent tax work and has never touched a FAFSA, go back and look at how the business got reported.

That one line may be the most expensive sentence in your financial life this year.

Onward.

-Andy "Check That One Number" Lockwood

P.S. FAFSA and the CSS Profile treat business value completely differently, which means the right answer depends on which form you're staring at. That distinction is worth real money and we walk through it inside the Lockwood Inner Circle, same as with our private 1:1 college advisory clients. A dollar gets you in: lockwoodinnercircle.com