hey there it's andy lockwood from lockwood college prep and I'm answering another question from the virtual mailbag that we just got recently and we've gotten this many times over the years the question is can my accountant help me with my financial aid applications So here's my short answer. The short answer is that's probably not a good idea. A longer answer might be there may be some accountants, and they're very rare, like unicorns, who are specialists in not only the IRS Department of Treasury rules, but also the Department of Education financial aid rules under Title IV. Financially is a completely different body of regulations that accountants are not trained on. And for the most part, accountants are busy enough doing all of the keeping up with and continuing education, learning on the IRS rules. Those change all the time. So it's very unusual to find an accountant who is a specialist in both areas. And I can tell you at our firm, I am not the financial aid specialist. That's my wife, Pearl. It's a lot for her to keep up with. And that's all she does. She's not an accountant. That's number one. Second reason that you may not want to ask your accountant is because they probably won't charge for it or they feel like they can't charge you much for it. And that at first blush might seem like a benefit to you. But the reality is that you're asking them to do something free and they're probably going to resent you a little bit. And they don't feel like they're experts, which might be why they're not charging. So you may not, you know, you may not get the best results there and you know, the cliche, you get what you pay for. So if they're doing, doing it for you for free, then that might be an issue that way. So not recommended, but who knows, maybe your accountant is, is not in that category. I think the biggest thing is that in general, and I'm not trying to bash accountants here, but most accountants are basically scorekeepers or umpires. They're calling balls and strikes. You dump all your stuff on them. They write up a tax return. They say, okay, here's how much you owe. Wow, you had a good year. Wow, you had a bad year. Most accountants are not strategists. They're not forthcoming, or they don't think in this way to help you figure out ways to, A, save money on your taxes, and B, of course, how to save money on college tuition by strategies and loopholes that might be behind the scenes in the regulations of the FAFSA, of the CSS profile financial aid application, which in my experience, most accountants have never heard of. And some schools have their own list of financial aid applications that they require you to do also. Some colleges are a lot more generous than others. That's sort of an experience type of base of knowledge that we have here. So frequently we're helping clients when they're finalizing their college list to steer towards some schools that are likely to be more generous or steer away and or steer away from other schools that are less likely to be generous. After we conduct an analysis of your income, your assets, a bunch of other factors like age and your home and other things like that, and your child's academic profile in terms of how he or she stacks up compared to the other competitors at each of the colleges that's on your list because the kids that are more desirable tend to be the ones who get larger financial aid awards whereas the students who have to beg borrow and steal and scratch and claw their way to get into a certain college are less likely to get financial aid whether it's merit aid or even need-based financial aid which may sound counterintuitive But those are my observations over the years. So we have plenty of accountants as clients. They turn to us because they realize that they are not experts. So if you are hoping that your accountant is going to be a good resource for you to do the financial aid applications, I would absolutely have a conversation with them, but try to ask them about some of the stuff that I just laid out here on this video. They may not be the experts that you need. Thanks for watching. If you want information about our services, and whether we can help you with this aspect of financial planning, of college planning, or more college advisory services, or SAT or ACT prep, or whatever. All that information is on our website, LockwoodCollegePrep.com. Thanks for watching, and I hope you found this valuable information. Bye-bye.
