Two families. Same income. Same $100,000 saved for college.

One gets meaningfully more financial aid than the other.

Nothing separates them except whose name the money is sitting in.

That's mistake number five, and it costs families more real dollars than anything else on my list of the 12 deadly college planning mistakes.

Start with the vocabulary, because it changed and a lot of people are still using the old word.

What used to be the EFC, the Expected Family Contribution, is now the SAI, the Student Aid Index. It's what the formula thinks you can pay for one year. Lower is better. A lower SAI means more eligibility.

It gets calculated differently depending on which form a given college uses. The FAFSA is required by every college in the country. The CSS Profile is required on top of the FAFSA by roughly 400 schools. Some colleges want other forms too. Your first job is simply finding out which forms each school on your list actually requires, because getting that wrong costs you eve...