Adjusting a College Financing Plan During Divorce

 Posted on December 15, 2018 in Child Support

Getting divorced can disrupt years of careful planning to pay for your children’s college educations. Both you and your co-parent may not have the financial resources to continue regular payments into a college fund. You may need to adjust your plan, which you can establish in your divorce agreement. Financial aid will also become more important, and your divorced status may increase the amount of aid that your child will be eligible to receive.

College Payment Plan

Illinois law allows you to petition to continue child support payments in order to pay for college after your child has turned 18. However, it may be more efficient to include a college financing plan as part of your divorce agreement than to try to extend your child support payments in the future. You can specify how you will divide the college expenses and other details, such as:

• Limits on annual payments;
• How many semesters the payments will continue;
• What constitutes college expenses, such as textbooks and off-campus housing;
• Whether there is an age limit for the student;
• Whether there are restrictions on which college the student may attend, such as a public vs. a private school;
• Whether the student must maintain a certain grade-point average; and
• Whether the payments should go to the other parent, the student, or the school.

Financial Aid

College financial aid is available to students who fill out a Free Application for Federal Student Aid or a CSS Profile at participating colleges. Application reviewers will use the income of the student’s parents to determine how much aid the student is eligible for. With FAFSA, a student of divorced parents can report only the income of the parent he or she lives with for a majority of the time. FAFSA will use the parent who pays a greater amount of child support if parenting time is divided equally. Both child support and spousal maintenance payments are part of your income, but a single parent likely has less income than a two-parent household, which should qualify your child for greater financial aid. With CSS financial aid, some colleges require the students to submit incomes from both of their divorced parents.

Contact a DuPage County Divorce Attorney

You can still afford to send your children to college after your divorce if you and your former spouse are willing to cooperate with each other and share the cost. A Warrenville, Illinois, divorce attorney at Calabrese Associates, P.C., can help you negotiate a college financing plan. Schedule a consultation by calling 630-393-3111.

Source:

http://www.finaid.org/questions/divorce.phtml