Free College

Do You Really Need a College Financial Aid Consultant?

Would you pay $200 to save $10,000? Or $25,000? Or $40,000? Let me start off by saying that hiring a college financial aid consultant is not absolutely necessary. Many families manage to put in the time and effort to research the financial aid process, and end up doing just fine. Having said that, I’ve seen firsthand how being uninformed and making mistakes when it comes to financial aid can lead to devastating consequences.

A friend of mine (we’ll call him Rob) is a prime example. He hired a “financial aid consultant” to help him navigate the bewildering financial aid system when his oldest son was applying to colleges. I don’t know the exact qualifications for the man who showed up at Rob’s house to “help” him, but, he was clearly not qualified. Rob’s son was subsequently admitted to the expensive private school of his choice (which was no surprise, since it wasn’t a selective school), and they paid full price for the privilege. The son graduated, and now, 4 years later, both Rob and his son are still struggling every month to cover the payments on over $80,000 in student loans. I look incredulously at Rob and ask him, “What were you thinking?!?” His response: “We just didn’t know.”

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All Education is Great and Sometimes Life Experience is a Great Education

Over the years, I have found wonderful sites for both real-life education, correspondence courses and online education. And the best opportunities there are for all people, no matter where or how they live are those that are at the sites for free online education. You can learn all types of subjects, from gardening, language, health, counseling, arts, music, collage art, power lifting, organizing, publishing and so many more topics, by just going online and doing the search for the topics. You will find correspondence courses, real-life courses at high schools, colleges and private schools and you will also find online courses. You can find religious, spiritual and Bible courses online also. Just keep on searching and you will come up with all the information that you need to take your education one step further than it is already.

Have you attended elementary school, only to have to quit due to lack of resources, money or transportation? Have you started high school but had to quit due to health reasons or family problems? Have you gone to some college but had to leave because the college was too expensive? Usually, during your life, you might have had to quit school at one time or another. And usually what happens is that it takes many long years to go back to be re-educated or for anyone to finish the education that they began already. I am living proof of that since I began college so many years ago but had to drop out due to lack of funds. Yes, I had the dream and the promise to myself that I would one day go back to finish college, but that had not happened for many years after the first drop out happened. And yes, some of us drop out of college, unwillingly, more than once, and usually it is due to lack of funds or lack of time, but never due to lack of ambition or yearnings.

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