Are You College Ready Through the Eyes of a Girl Scout?

Hi, so today we are doing a college planning webinar. I'm so happy for the people that did join. I'm so sorry for the people that did join because I have sent the link out. But it's basically about how to financially plan for college and pick the right college for you. And I know it can be really stressful, as it has been for me, because I am a senior and I'm kind of going through the same process right now. So it's like I'm kind of confused myself. So I teamed up with Capico and kind of worked with them, and they have a very good informational webinar and information about it. So that's it. We're gonna get started with the webinar.

All right, outstanding. Thank you all for joining. My name is Shellee Howard, and I'm the founder and CEO of College Ready, and I'm so looking forward to sharing with you things that are going to blow your mind. Most people have no idea what it takes to get into college and to do it without going into massive debt. So we have some great people to share with you. I can't wait to introduce them all. But before we do, we're going to ask that you take a little quiz. It's not a hard quiz. It's not anything that's going to, you know, stress you out or anything like that. But I'm going to launch it. So if you can take a moment, please. There are 12 questions. And so answer each one of them to the best of your ability, and we will give you the answer. So the beautiful part is, if you don't know the answer before you leave, you will. And I encourage you to participate. The more you put into this, the more you'll get out of it. Thank you so much, Nabilia, for setting this up. And once everybody completes the quiz, we will go ahead and get started. So please go ahead and start the quiz now. Thumbs up, everybody can see the quiz. Got it. Awesome. Okay, I'm going to give you just a few more minutes. It's important that you complete it so you'll have an idea of how close you are to being ready to apply to college. The more information you understand about this process, the more empowered you will be, and I encourage you all to gain as much knowledge as possible because it will save you a ton of time and money. Okay, I'm gonna leave the poll up. Feel free to continue and complete the quiz. I will be sharing the answers. So if you're just joining now, you want to make sure that, um, you have completed the quiz. All right, outstanding. I see somebody doing it. Good, good, good. Okay, 1 person, 2 people. All right, we're on a roll now. Well done. All right, I'm gonna leave it open for just a bit, and I'm gonna go ahead and kick off the meeting. So thank you all for attending. Again, my name is Shellee Howard. I'm here to support you and Hopefully— no, I know you will walk away with a ton of great information. We're here to share how to make college more affordable for your family. The goal here is to empower you with the knowledge to make the choices that will get you into college and get you out without massive debt. So here's the quiz. And now that you have all completed it, I'm gonna share some of the answers. So number 1, what is the term COA in college planning? The answer is C, cost of attendance. We'll go into depth of— in, uh, for each of these questions and just let you know some of the details. Trying to move the screen. There we go. Number 2, how many pieces are there in college planning? So think of a puzzle. How many pieces do you think it takes to be knowledgeable? The answer, C. Okay, we're going to teach you the 3 major pieces. Of course, there's a whole puzzle. It is a big puzzle with lots of pieces, but there are 3 main pieces. Number 3: If my student has a high GPA and a high test score, they are assured to— of being accepted into their desired college. True or false? The answer is false. There is not one piece of this puzzle that assures anybody to get into anywhere. The more pieces you have in place, the more you get to pick where you want to go. Number 4: I or we earn too much money to qualify for grants or assistance. So number 4 is B, that is false, and we'll deep dive into that in just a bit. Number 5: What is the ideal number of colleges to apply for admission? The answer is C, 10 to 12, but not 10 to 12 REACH schools. It needs to be Reach schools, comfort schools, and safety schools. I know you're not super excited to attend your safety school, but they may offer you a ton of money you can negotiate with other schools. We're going to give you little tidbits, so hang tight, there's more to come. Number 6, the SAI in college admission stands for Student Aid Index. This is a new term that you may not be familiar with, so just be mindful that is a new term. Number 7: What is the average time for a student to graduate, um, from a 4-year college? The answer on this one is truly which college you decide to attend. Kind of a trick question, I know, but in all reality There are some schools that cap you at 16 units a semester. You cannot graduate in 4 years. Don't you think that would be really important before you apply? 100%. Number 8: It does not matter what lender you borrow from for college needs. A loan is a loan. Eh, be false. There are good loans and there are bad loans. I don't like any loans, but if you have to take them out, at least know which loans are good. Number 9: From 1981 to 2023, tuition costs have increased by— oh, who got this one right? C, 533%. Ouch. We want to help you to not fall into that category. 10: Is it possible to pay less for a private college than a public college? Is it? Yes, it is, and we're going to show you how. So stay tuned, but I do have to give a disclaimer. Uh, before I do, I want to make sure that everybody has been admitted and ready to rock and roll. So there are So far everybody is in. Just wanted to make sure nobody got left out. Just let me— oh, here comes a few more. Welcome everyone, welcome! There are a few of you who are just coming in, and I want to make sure that you have everything you need.

Alright.

Awesome. Okay, let's go ahead and dive right in and get started. For those of you who are just coming into this presentation right now, there is a quiz we encourage you to complete. As you're doing that, I'm going to share about the disclaimer. So the following presentation is an educational program and is not intended to sell investment or insurance products, nor is it intended to provide tax or legal advice. Consult with your tax advisor and/or legal counsel for suitability for your specific situation. We would love to help you with your specific situation, but this presentation is not that time yet. This presentation is not endorsed or approved by the IRS, Social Security Office, or any other government agency. Hypothetical and/or actual historical returns contained in this presentation are informational purposes only and are not intended to be an offer, solicitation, or recommendation. Rates of return are not guaranteed and are for illustrative purposes only. Tax advice disclosure: to ensure compliance with requirements imposed by the IRS, we inform you that any U.S. federal tax advice contained in this course and related material is not intended or written to be used. Okay, we have to say all of that just to protect us and to protect you, but let's go ahead and get started because we have a ton of great information. So I, as I mentioned earlier, my name is Shellee Howard. I am the founder and CEO of College Ready, and I am so happy you are here. I help students in middle school and high school and their parents get prepared for college admissions, helping them create a standout strategy, get into their best fit college, and do it without going into debt. I want them to see— succeed now in college and especially after college. My personal professional qualifications are the following: As I mentioned, College Ready has been around for 16 application seasons. That's 16 years. I'm an international speaker, award winner. I've been featured on TV, in magazines, and I'm an author of a bestselling book, How to Send Your Student to College Without Losing Your Mind or Your Money. But what my qual— my qualifications really are is I'm a mother of 4. Who have navigated this process and who have all graduated debt-free. My first went to Harvard. He did pre-med there, graduated with zero debt, went on to UC San Diego Medical School, and is now an orthopedic surgeon at UCLA. What a launch to life. The second child is my daughter, who started at the University of Alabama. She enjoyed her time there, graduated debt-free, went on to CBU and is now a pediatric emergency room nurse. My second son is at San Francisco State and he is going to be going into news and broadcasting, graduating debt-free. And my second daughter said, well, they've all done that. I'm going to go get a dual degree in the U.S. and in Europe, and she's studying at AAU in Prague. So as you can see, my qualifications really go much deeper than just who I am. Um, we only see your bio page. Okay, got it. All right, so let's go on. Kevin, can you go ahead and introduce yourself and let our listeners know My name is—

yeah, absolutely. And sorry if it's choppy. And by the way, anyone who's attending right now, we are going to record and we do have other recordings that we can send. So if there's any sort of connection issue, hey, please just let us know in the chat. That way we know that we can take action and share something else with you. But also, we do this often, so we'll be able to share another presentation if for some reason there's some technical difficulty there. But my name is Kevin Rourke. I'm the founder and CEO of CapeCo. It's a financial planning firm. I've been in the financial planning business for about 8 years. This year we are proud to be number 2 out of a group of about 5,000 financial planners nationwide. We have a team. It looks like, Shellee, we might have to share. Pressing the next button. Oh, there we go. Request. Okay, so my team consists of all the credentials you see right here. So Certified Financial Planners, Chartered Financial Consultants. We don't just focus on investments. It's not just an investment firm. We're what we call comprehensive financial planners. Okay, so the list up here, we can do trust, we focus on Social Security, and the purpose that we're here today again is college funding. So a little bit of housekeeping. Attendance is good, but participation is better. If you guys have any questions at all, please put that in the chat. We can come back towards the end of the presentation and share that with you. Also, we will address any questions again at the end. We— the thing I find most common is if you're typing questions in the middle of the presentation, we're most likely going to answer your question shortly. So make sure— notate that if you still have the question at the end, we'd be more than happy to address that if we have the time, and at the very least, we're going to make an offer for you guys to come one-on-one see us in the office there. We will have a couple things to ask of you. This is a free presentation. One is an evaluation form. So whenever we're finished, we're going to send an email to everybody, see how we did, see if there's any more information that we could give to you that we might not have covered in this period of time. And then we are going to offer one free scholarship offer at the very end, and we'll explain more, but you have to stay till the end is the little hook there for us to find out what that offer would be for you guys. So we'll go to the next slide. Here's last week's winner. This is actually not technically last week. We haven't done this. Our last seminar's winner. We haven't done— we take the summers off. A lot of families and students are traveling, so we don't do a lot of presentations. But we did offer this family. So again, just stick to the end and we'll explain that. Again, financial planning is not just investments. Here's a number of other classes we teach around the country. We actually have gone outside the country as well to teach some of these as well. Personal wealth building, principles of retirement. Again, today we're only focused on college planning. College planning. Again, this presentation here, the 3 other ones that we are actively teaching. So we switch classes every year. Teach a few new ones is Your Dream Retirement, uh, Tax Reduction Strategy, and Estate Planning. So you're more than welcome to, uh, be invited to any of those classes if you wish, or we do have some recordings. So if you're interested, please feel free to chat. But again, today we're strictly focused on college planning strategies. Okay, so here's another list of comprehensive financial planning goals. Diversification, Why I'm putting all these lists here of what's important is college planning is a huge impact on your financial health, right? I've been doing financial planning for 8, 9 years, and what— why I got into this industry is after about 5 years, I've seen a number of families coming in at age 60, 65, and they're wondering when they can retire. And I said, you know, you can't retire in 10 years where you want to because you have $200,000 of college debt. Right. And so I have a number of ways, and a lot of ways we're going to teach you today of how we can address that. We can try to solve that for you. So again, I'm the founder of Cape Coast College Planning. I did partner with Shellee Howard because I, I can do the financial piece. You know, once you know where you want to go to school, you know what the bottom line is. We can help you pay for it. However, if you want to go to Rice University here in Houston, we're going to be paying $70,000 per year. Is there any way that we can cut that cost in half? And there actually is a lot of ways we could even do it for free, potentially. And that's kind of what we want to educate you on today. Shellee Howard's really the one who specializes at College Ready with the student. What should we put on the resume? Why should we apply to this school? What is the purpose of what we're doing? And then once we get to that point, it's my job and our financial team's job to close that gap. How are we actually going to pay, and can we pay? That's a, that's a huge question that we need to address as well. So that's the partnership between Shellee and I. I myself am from Indianapolis, Indiana, born and raised. This is my beautiful wife Maggie. We've been together and we've known each other since we were about 9 years old, actually, both from Indiana. I played college football in Virginia, and then I started my career off in San Diego. So I've been all, all around the country doing financial planning. I am the youngest of 3. This is our wedding picture. These are my 2 older sisters. But I'm going to share some mistakes that I made in my college planning process that you guys can avoid, some of the major mistakes most people actually make. So one of the quiz questions Shellee shared with you is what is SAI? What does that stand for? Which is Student Aid Index. Student Aid Index is a brand new term in the college planning world. And you guys will all, especially if you're seniors, you're going to be seeing what that word is about springtime, right? Whenever you get your award letters back. So what it is, it used to be called Expected Family Contribution, EFC, based on mom and dad's assets and the student's assets and income. The government's going to deem a number on you as a family, what they think you can afford per student per year. Right. And it's just like tax planning. So there's certain things that count into that calculation. There's certain things that don't count into that calculation. And it's my job to help a family. Can we situate assets just to lower the EFC? And the lower the EFC or the SAI, Student Aid Index, the higher amount of scholarships that you're eligible for. So we're going to dig into depth there. But there's a number of things that you don't need to put onto the FAFSA form, which is the Free Application for Student Aid. If you're unaware what that is, every year that you're going to college and you want to apply for scholarships or financial aid, you need to fill out the FAFSA. Okay, and in the FAFSA is going to be your financial information. So what is your— whatever your taxes paid last year, what was your income last year, what's in your investment accounts, all these things are what's going to matter in different variations depending on where we're going to school. When I went to school, as I said, I played college football. After my freshman year, I had 6 knee surgeries, which then put my scholarships out the window. No longer was— did I have an athletic scholarship to pay for my school. So when I filled my FAFSA out, my parents were separated since I was 6 years old. Uh, both had remarried at the time, uh, or down the road. And one major rule that most families make that are in a separated household— if you are in a separated household, you only need to put one parent on the FAFSA. It's a common misconception, and the rule as to who that parent is has changed in the past. Most recently, It's the parent who provides the most financial support for the student. So that was mistake number 1 for me. I put both parents' income on the FAFSA form. And so immediately now I'm starting with my SAI all the way up here, and I'm, I'm basically sacrificing any sort of scholarships or aid or help that I otherwise would have qualified for. The most common mistake on the FAFSA is including the equity in your primary household on the FAFSA form. Okay, so I put mom and dad's income and the equity in mom and dad's home, both homes. Okay, major mistake number 2. So I went to Radford University later after my football career ended, and I started a clothing company with this guy right here. If you're not familiar with who that is, that's Stephen Curry, a great basketball player, but a good friend, family friend of mine. His brother is actually one of my best friends, and I'm the godfather of his kids. But I'm not putting that up there to say, hey, look, I know Stephen Curry. The reason why I'm putting that up there is any assets in the student's name is going to be very different from any assets in mom and dad's name in that FAFSA form. Up to 50% of the assets in mom or dad's name is going to be counted into that calculation for student aid index and how much scholarship the student's eligible for. Any assets in the student's— I'm sorry, I misspoke. Any assets in mom or dad's name, 5%. Any assets in the student's name up to 50%. So big difference there. So if you have any college savings accounts, let's say, in your student's name, you might want to look at, is there ability to put that in mom or dad's name? Should we have a savings account with the student, or should that be in mom and dad's name? That's just one example of what we specialize in on the financial side of things to best position the students for max scholarship. Common mistake number 4 is if you own a business and you have 100 employees or less, you do not need to claim the equity of that business. So I made every mistake in the book. I claimed my business and I even puffed it up a little bit. I was proud that I owned a clothing line. I was, oh yeah, it's probably worth this much money when really it's probably worth this much money. I got zero scholarships at all outside of the football scholarship. I disqualified myself completely financially. When that was absolutely unnecessary. I could have qualified for quite a bit of scholarships, and we're going to teach you guys how to not make those mistakes and more mistakes in the future. So with our team, we have, like I said, financial planners, we have former admissions officers, former college guidance counselors, former strategic enrollment managers that help our students, uh, got anything under the sun that you can plan. Where should I go to school? Should I go to school? What should I major in? All of those, anything. We meet the student where they are. We specialize in athletes. This is my nephew on the left. His name is Riley. He is ranked number 2 in the country as a rising junior in baseball. Very, very skilled. Also a straight-A student. Riley still needs— he's not going to get a full-ride scholarship. Academic or athletics very rarely will give you a full-ride scholarship. But he also cares very much so about where he's going to go to school academically. Like I said, straight-A student, not just an athlete. He wants to have a backup to the backup plan, and our team's able to address that for him. His cousin here, her name's Anna. She's in a completely different world. No clue what she wants to do. She has no clue where she wants to go. Very intimidated by the entire college planning process. And that's why we have a guidance counselor that can meet with her. She doesn't want to hear from her uncle what I think she should do, but we have a full team. Shellee Howard is one of the best in the country, and why I partnered with her into meeting the students where they are. And this little guy right here is going to be graduating in 2030. He likes to play a lot of video games, so we're just going to be praying for him for the time being, but we'll be hanging in there for him. So I'll give it back to Shellee Howard to give a little bit more about her perspective and what she's done.

I think it's important to realize there's a ton of information out there. And the reason why I got involved in this area so long ago, actually when my oldest was in 8th grade, is he came home from middle school and he says, Mom, I know exactly what I want to do. And I'm like, wow, that, that's crazy. I changed my major 5 times. That, like, tell me. He said, yeah, I want to be a brain surgeon. I want to go to a top-tier school. And I was like, Okay. And so these two, my two children, were the reason why College Ready got started, because when my son— fast forward— graduated from high school, he had 7 full-ride offers. He ended up going to Harvard, pre-med, graduating debt-free, going on to UC San Diego Medical School, and he is now an orthopedic surgeon at UCLA. He has no debt and he's a doctor. That is a life-changing situation. My daughter, on the other hand, she— her dream was to go to University of Alabama. And I remember asking her why. And she says, duh, Mom, the football. And after we had a good laugh and reprioritized, it was because of the nursing program. So I have a doctor and a nurse. I was an athlete. I played softball for the USA. Many years ago. Uh, that was a picture of me in Hong Kong competing, and I have found that my passion is really teenagers, helping them prepare for life. So I have put together a program that is called EmpowerEducation.World, where we teenagers here in the U.S. empower others to provide education. We're building a school in Uganda. And so they, they're the reason why I love the work that I do. So as far as my experience goes, I have been doing this for going on 16 years. I am part of the NACAC. I am part of HECA. I believe that college planning and ethics go hand in hand. We encourage families, we support them, We help them figure out what they want to do, what they want to major in, and how much money they'll need to make. So it's not only just getting them into a school, it's helping them understand how to get out without debt and have a return on investment for their education. My passion is travel every moment I get, and I recently just got back from Uganda, where you can see in the bottom picture here, I'm physically building a school with the other children there. So I love what I do, and I partner with people such as Kevin who have the same passion that I do for helping students all over the world. So why do we do this educational workshop? It's one thing to have a passion. I totally get it. It's another thing to take our time where we're not asking you to pay anything. We're doing this because we know it's life-changing. The experiences that you're going through right now, if you are doing things because you think they're gonna get you into college and you find out later you just spent your time doing a ton of things that do not matter, you're not gonna be very happy. The, the reality is we're here because we don't want you to make mistakes. Kevin made mistakes. I have lots of families that came to me after they made mistakes with their firstborn. And I get to help them understand that not everybody knows all of this information. It has never been more expensive or more competitive to get into college, and it is my passion to help over a million families get into college and graduate debt-free. Why we do these educational workshops is we haven't figured out, or we've been told many times Why didn't somebody tell us this? We wouldn't have made that mistake of taking 3 art classes our freshman year in high school if we knew that was going to hurt our weighted or unweighted GPA. Taking non-academic classes can kill your GPA. And you don't even know that ASB is unweighted. Your athletics are unweighted. This is a problem for a lot of families, and unfortunately your high schools do not get paid more if you get into a good college. I am based on your referrals. I really care that you know this information and that you are incredibly successful. So our goal today is to take you from the "I don't know" to "I now know" and empower you with that information. So here's what you're going to learn during this presentation: how to pay less for college so you can save more for retirement and enjoy the next few years without worry. Enjoy being at home. Enjoy your senior year in high school. The formula for planning for school so you can pay the least amount for college. I think everybody, even if you can afford it, would love not to have to pay full price. And then how to avoid the biggest mistake— mistakes other families have made. You know, listening to Aunt Susie or your best friend's sister's uncle is all well and fine, but they may like writing essays and you may not. Really be careful who you listen to. The topics for today are Insider admission strategies. I'm going to tell you what colleges are looking for, how to maximize grants and financial aid. We want you to be able to afford college. How to attend a private college for, yes, less than a state school, and forms that need to be completed, not that it would be nice to be completed, but they're very critical for your success. So you may be asking, why college? Do I even want to go to college? I think these are all great questions, but I want to challenge you students that are on this call. I often get students nowadays who are like, you know, I think I'm just going to be an influencer. It looks really cool to just have people throw money at you online, but let's get clear. How will you write a business plan? That's a big pause. That's what you learn in college. So even if you want to be an influencer, even if you want to be an entrepreneur, you definitely want to consider the value of an education and the value of going to college. So these are all good reasons why college. So now let's talk about the poll. So as those people were entering the room and we started to take a look at the poll, We wanted to really get a good idea, so I'm gonna end the poll right now and I'm gonna give you the results. So here are the results, and as you look at, um, what graduation class is your child in, in this group, let's see what number was that. Average time, how much to borrow, tuition, is it possible. Here we go. So today we have, um, 33% will graduate in 2024, 33% in 2025, no 26ers, 33% in '27, and we have the middle school. I love this. So we have a great mix, and you know, good on you. I think it's important. So think about All of this is gonna matter to all of you. When we look at when is the best time to start planning for college, the best time is now. It doesn't matter where you're at in the process. Now is definitely the best time. So what do we want to consider for goal 2? Outstanding. Which of you thought it was most important? To get accepted or to be able to afford it? Wow, all of you said both equally. Super important. So important that you guys are wise, because if you don't get accepted, it doesn't really matter if you can afford it. So those are the things that you're going to learn today. College is a business. They want— you know, it's hard to explain to people when you look at college as a business because it's an emotional thing for most people. Most people are like, I just want to get into my dream school. I don't care what it costs. Well, unfortunately, that's a big mistake. And colleges need you as much as you need them. Remember, if they didn't have your tuition, they wouldn't be in business. You want to pay the least amount possible, right? So the better your standout strategy, the better your financial house is in order, the more you will save. You know, Harvard has a massive endowment, $53.2 Billion. I'm talking more money than you can ever imagine. I remember when they were trying to convince— yes, they had to convince me that my son should go to Harvard because I thought having him closer to home was a great idea. They convinced me that there's more money there that will help him get in and out in 4 years, ready to jump into adulthood. And were they right? His very first job out of Harvard with zero, zero job experience, $100,000 a year at 23. That is a lot of money. So everything about what we're going to share is practical. It's things that will help you to be successful. There are 3 major pieces that we talk about in the planning of the, the, the entire puzzle. One, you've gotta get accepted. That is my specialty. Two, we wanna get you some finances, scholarships, grants, need-based, whatever that is. We're gonna help you do that. And then Kevin's specialty is how will you pay. All three is needed for your success. So getting accepted is where, where we will start. So here are some of the challenges that each family has to go through. So you may not understand how this process works. You may be thinking, this is so confusing, or, you know, I was a college student, I can figure this out. Well, it's changed. It actually changes about every 4 years. I don't have time to coach my child. Not only do you not have time, I spent 30 hours a week on top of my full-time career figuring this out for my firstborn. So the process has changed. It has become more competitive, more expensive, and just honestly, it is just darn difficult. We don't want you to feel stuck or overwhelmed. There are certain forms you need to complete. The FAFSA is one of them. The deadline over the year is going to change. In years past, right, it opened on October 1st, and then it's first come, first serve. The money does, does end. It's not like a constant flow. So we used to tell parents and, and students, when it opens, jump on it. Now we're letting families know the FAFSA is changing, and now you're going to be doing it in December this year. It's going to change. This has become so confusing that we're studying it right now. You're probably spinning. So please let us help you understand what is the latest and greatest. Apply early. Okay, first come, first serve. There 46 questions, 91% error rate. That's kind of scary. We don't want you to mess up because if you mess up, you're going to be like Kevin. We don't want you to be like Kevin. That's not a good situation. All right, CSS Profile. Now you're like, there's another one? Yes, there is. I didn't know it until we got to Harvard. So I did fill out the FAFSA. As a matter of fact, I've completed it 9 times personally. What I didn't know is CSS Profile gets in your business. The FAFSA kind of gets in your personal business. The CSS, they want to know everything. And I often joke that I thought I was giving up my firstborn child because it is so invasive. We don't want you to have to do it alone. Private schools definitely are going to lean towards this direction, but it's not this school, that school. Every school can do it their own way. If you don't complete it, you lose money. They get you coming, they get you going. Even high-income families can get merit aid and institutional aid. There's so much money out there. Like I said, it's just knowing where to tap into it. There's school-specific applications: the Common App, the Coalition App, the UC App. The school, school applications. So at one school like University of Alabama, you can complete one application or you can complete another application. What I will tell you, because you're on this call, is stay away from the Coalition app. Statistically, if you don't have to do that application, don't do it. It is not proven to be the one most people get selected from. They're not going to be happy about that, but I want you to have the insider information. Essays— if there's a, a question or an essay that says optional, it is not optional. It is for the lazy students who don't want to go to that school. It's optional. But for you brilliant people on this call, it is not optional. Again, really important information. We coach you, we assist you, so you don't have to figure it out. The big question is, how many questions should you apply to? We apply to 12 for reach, for comfort, for safety. We have a strategy to pick which of those are important. An example would be using 2 schools to play off each other. Did you know that you could take GT and if they give you a, a large dollar amount and VT that gives you no dollars and you can compete against each other? Yes, you can, but you need help doing it. Because if you just say, I want money like that, it's not going to happen. But if you have a well-written, thought-out letter that we can help you with, you'll be in a much better situation. So let's talk about the U.S. News and World Report. I am not a big fan, I'm going to admit, because what happens is It is bit of a game. This is a place where how colleges are ranked. Admissions officers do not make final decisions on your child. Strategic enrollment managers do. So again, remember the business thing that I talked about? I want you to be really clear. This is when it becomes a business because when you take the PSAT your junior year, Your scores are now out in the world, and you're gonna start getting bombarded. I'm sure the senior in the room knows what I'm talking about. You'll get bombarded. Apply to this school. We want you. Well, I promise you, if you have a 2.5 GPA and you're getting a letter, we want you from an Ivy League, they're just trying to, to inflate their numbers. Because let's be honest, that's not a good fit school for a 2.5 GPA student. But if you apply and you get denied, their stats go up. So be careful what you read. It's not always what it seems. Secrets colleges do not want you to know. So remember I mentioned the Strategic Enrollment Manager? This is a person who has to do the balancing for the school, right? You can't have all accountants, you have— can't have all lawyers, all doctors. They have to know how many of each major, they have to know how much diversity, they have to know how many leaders, they have to know. This person has a very important job, but be careful, it is a business. U.S. News and World Report has an admission yield that I talked about. Again, give it the weight it deserves. Look, they look at a certain number of applicants, certain number of applications, so be careful what you read online is the best thing I can share with you. If you work with me, I actually have information of who got in last year, what was their test score, what was their GPA, and if you meet with Kevin and I, I'll share it with you, but it has to be specific to you because remember, college is made up of 7 puzzle pieces. I wish I could give you all of them today, but I can't. But if you meet with us, I promise I will. So let's keep going. How to get accepted. We talk about positioning. We talk about a standout strategy. Let's talk about Natalie. She wanted to go to Pepperdine. She was Hispanic. She had a 3.7 GPA, a 1050 SAT. She was a biology major, um, uh, so she wanted biology, chemical engineering. So our team of admissions officers evaluated, we analyzed the algorithms from the university, we optima— um, optimal optimally positioned her for success. And so we helped her understand that sometimes her major could be the reason why she may not get in. So we have to look at, is it the school she wants to get into or the major she wants to get into? Natalie was accepted, and we got her family $30,000 in scholarships. So how about that? Just a few things that you can tweak can make a big difference. So the strategic enrollment manager, let's look at Marcus. He's a freshman in high school and he wants to go to UCLA. He has a 4.1 GPA, again engineering. This young person plays guitar. Our team looked at the whole strategy. We interviewed the music department at the school he wanted to go to, UCLA. We found that they had trouble finding bassoon players. Our student decided, "Huh, I could play the bassoon if I could go to UCLA." Marcus got accepted. Marcus also received $24,000 in gift aid. Do you know how to help your students stand out? We do, and we want to help you academically, financially, socially, and athletically. Yes, we want you to be happy when you get there, and yes, we know how to help student athletes. What affects the first pillar? Okay, what affects— how do you get in? Remember I told you I was gonna tell you? I'm gonna tell you right now. GPA with rigor. SAT, ACT, IB, dual enrollment, AP tests matter, especially if you want scholarships. Passion with purpose. I could have a whole webinar on the importance of a standout strategy. If you follow me on social media, I give a ton of information. If you want help, reach out to me. I'm happy to, to guide you. 4, your extracurricular activities. 5, how many things have you led? 6, those teachers, their letters of recommendation matters. For those of you who go online and don't put on your camera, guess what? There is no letter of recommendation. You need to know this information. 7, essays are critical. We use essay editors to Polish your essays. We do not write them because you will do a better job, but we sure do know how to polish them. Diversity and inclusion. Yes, this is a reality. Activities, honors, and awards. Do you know they're gonna ask for 20 of them? 20 different things. And college interviews are game-changing, but you need to know how to prepare, what questions to ask, and we do all of that. And so much more. So in summary, let's talk about that roadmap. You need a standout strategy. Our strategic certified consultants— I should stop for a minute and help you understand what a certified consultant means. It means that I have an undergrad degree. It means I have a master's degree. It means I have an independent certified college consultant certification from UC San Diego. It means that every year I belong to an ethics organization, actually belong to 3. I hold a leadership position. I am not a mom who thinks they know what they're doing and are going to help somebody else. Yes, I am a mom and yes, I can help. But I also have all of this behind me. I have also toured 25 colleges a semester. So if you say, Shellee Howard, I want to know about Pepperdine, I've been to Pepperdine. Amazing view. Did you know they also clean your dorm rooms? Anyway, that's for another day. So we analyze the school algorithms. What do the universities need, want? How to stand out from the crowd? We designed the student standout strategy. We then market the student because what happens is students will say, I belong to the National Honor Society. And what students don't understand is the National Honor Society at one school is a club. It's a pizza party. At another school, it's insanely rigorous with essays and interviews, and they don't know which is your student. So that can be the game changer right there. We help them understand academically, socially, athletically. How to get scholarships. Our counselors put together a strategic college plan, help them to pick college majors, help them to know, do they take the AP test, the SAT, the ACT, IB, dual enrollment? Your head should be spinning. Passion with purpose and having a standout strategy. Extracurriculars, the good ones and the not so good ones. We recommend what path to take, but ultimately your student has to work the path. We recommend what they talk about in each prompt and how to answer each prompt. We help them to understand how to have the right 10 to 12 schools so they get in to at least 9 of them and have a financial negotiation strategy. We help them to understand where does the school and family align. We want them to graduate in less than 4 years if at all possible. We want them to have the highest school ranking. And now Kevin is going to share the financial side.

Thank you, Shellee Howard. I think I should move to Pepperdine. They're cleaning your room. I'm interested in that. I got to re-enroll, I think. So thank you. That, that was puzzle piece number 1. So getting accepted. That's everything there. Now we're going to switch more to the money side, more numbers, statistics, math, and how that system actually works. So when we think of the word scholarship, it's going to come from 3 main areas. We have need-based aid, which I taught you earlier briefly, and we're dig more detail, but Student Aid Index. How much based on your family's income and assets are you going to qualify for, for need-based aid? Then we have merit-based aid, and that's going to be based on GPA, SAT, ACT scores, testing scores. Then we have institutional aid. And when you heard Shellee Howard say standout strategy, it's building your resume to make you look unique in the eyes of the school. That's where they're going to start offering you some more scholarships from the institutional side. So the good thing about this is if you make a lot of money, okay, maybe we not make— we don't have a lot of need-based aid to be had, but we still have the merit-based and we still have the institutional-based aid available to us. Okay, so what you need to know, the rules are created by Congress, right? The government's constantly changing the rules. We've already told you a few versions of that. They're constantly saying, oh, we're going to make it easier on you, and it never ends up being, uh, easier. It looks like the slides are clicking back on me here. Go back. There we go. They calculate what you can afford based on a 101 criteria. That is the, the formula itself to calculate student aid index, right? Just the formula itself is 36 printed pages long. It's to say it's not simple. So, and again, they don't always make sense because Congress created it. Looks like my slides keep going back and forth. Sorry about that. Okay. And then understanding how the rules apply to you is very important and how we're going to save you money. So every single family is going to be completely unique.

I—

there's not a blanket answer. There is blanket calculation, however. So as Shellee Howard was addressing, this is what's important. The essay, the resume is important. However, it really depends on where you want to go, why you want to go there, and who you are as a person. Financially is more black and white. But please, I'm going to put a link in the chat box. Everybody, if you would like to book a one-on-one session with us, we'll make an offer at the end, but go ahead and and save that just in case anything happens or we get disconnected here. Okay. So it's expensive, expensive no matter where you go. It's not just tuition. People that make that mistake, you look at the cost of attendance, think it's, it's just simply $30,000 a year. That's where it's not just the calculation there. 4 years can cost $80,000 to $300,000 depending on where the school and depending on how you set yourself up for success. Are we going to be in the merit-based aid category. If we're applying to 12 schools, as Shellee Howard said, we want to split that up between top-tier schools, uh, reach schools, your comfort schools, and then your backup schools. Because you can't expect to get a lot of merit-based aid from one of your reach schools because you're not going to be in the top percentile for GPA there. We're going to be realistic unless money's not a matter to you, you just want to go where you want to go, and we'll meet you where you are there. But we, we're realistic with the goals and what we have in mind here. The cost definitely goes up 10 to 12% every year, but we have a few people on here— a lot of times we do these classes and people are raising their hand for when's your student going to graduate, 2024, 2025. So multiply this $80,000 to $300,000 for 4 years times how many children you have. For those of you, if there's any parents on that have multiple children, that cost keeps adding up. It gets really expensive. So let's break down what cost of attendance really means. Tuition, fees, room and board, books, transportation, personal expenses. Oh, we want tickets to the UT game. I want the foam finger. I want the helmet. I want the sweatshirt. These are all costs that are going to add up, right? And so let's look at an example of actually broken down here. So tuition here is $36,428. We're going to assume that's in-state tuition. If we're looking at out-of-state tuition, we're going to probably be up another $20,000. Right. Room and board's $11,000. Campus comprehensive fee, $917. ASM fee, they're going to— all universities are going to have their different individual fees. We have people that are interns in our office that are in University of Houston right now. They have to pay $650 for the parking pass, but then they come in and say, I don't even have to use the parking pass. My building is way on the other side of that lot. You still have to pay that fee, right? College is a business, so we get that as kind of a repetition. They want the most money out of you. You want to pay the least amount. So we're going to help you learn the secrets, so to speak, here. Okay. Cost keeps rising. So how is a family supposed to pay for all that? We have savings. I think the average family is about $15,000 per, per family, not per student saved up. But on average, if the cost is $40,000 per year, Uh, it's not sufficient. So good for you if you have the amount of savings, but let's talk again about the student aid index calculation. If you were diligent and you were a good parent and you saved $100,000, $150,000, $200,000 for school, well, that's calculating against your student for how much aid they're going to qualify for, for the student aid index calculation that we talked about earlier. And we'll dig into some more math details there. Borrow. As Shellee Howard said, we're not huge fans of borrowing. Sometimes it makes financial sense if there's positive arbitrage, if we're making more money where the money's parked as opposed to borrowing. We're not going to dig too much into that, but it is an option for people out there if we need it. Scholarship. We get a lot of moms coming in, oh, my student's going to get a full-ride scholarship, she's very intelligent. I hope so. I hope every family gets a full-ride scholarship, but the reality is It's not average— on average what happens, right? And you have to know what you're doing to position yourself to get there, and that's what we specialize in. Okay, we can do go to a lesser school. One of the things I hate is sacrificing the caliber of school that the student's able to go to simply because of the cost. And we're going to dig into mathematically again, how can we go to a private university for actually cheaper than a state school. We'll give you some real-life calculations on that. Not go at all. I think we can all agree that college might not be for everyone. And I'm not here to say that you need to go to college. Maybe you're teeter-tottering. Maybe you don't know what you want to go for. You know, please come into the office. We're a great source to talk to you and see— I know the questions to ask and kind of guide your, your mind along the path of, you know, there's certifications out there in my world, finance. There's financial certifications that you don't need a 4-year degree It takes a couple of years to get the certification. There's certain, you know, my business partner's neighbor, he is, he's a plumber, but he makes $600,000 a year, right? He always says he smells real bad. But hey, $600,000 a year, that's not too bad, right? So it's not for everyone, but come see us so we can help you decide that. Financial aid myth versus reality. These are some of the highest myths that just are not based in reality. And we'll break down what they are a little bit later. But my income is too high, we won't qualify for any aid. Not completely true. Our child's grades are too low. Yes, that might hinder acceptance and it might hinder merit-based aid, but there's still some other avenues for aid that we can get to. We own a home. Again, number one mistake on the FAFSA is claiming that equity in the primary household. Do not claim the equity on the primary household. I'll say it two more times after this, I think. Aid is only for special groups. Sometimes it is, sometimes it's not, but it's not only— it's not only specifically for special groups. We're going to teach you how you can tap into that. It's an easy process. If it was an easy process, I would not have this part of my career in the financial planning world, right? You wouldn't be here today. High school advisors can help. Again, I don't think you'd be here if the high school advisors were able to help. They're a great source. I'm not saying don't go to the high school advisors. Go talk to them. They might have some local scholarships, some links. Weeks, some advice, but they're overworked. They have— typically a private high school has 1 counselor for every 100 to 200 students, and then the public high school is 1 every 400 to 500 students. So they don't have the time to sit one-on-one with you and really give you the advice that you need. Okay, so let's go a little bit further here. Again, 3 scholarships. We're going to be repetition. Repetition is how we learn. So merit-based aid, GPA, SAT test scores. Need-based aid based on your income and assets, institutional aid based on your uniqueness. Okay, so the 3 magic letters. If you can understand these 3 magic letters— I see someone raising their hand. Please put your questions in the chat box. If we don't address it in the next few slides, we'll come back at the end, try to answer those questions for you. And if you don't want it in the public chat, feel free to send a direct message to Shellee Howard. Okay, so 3 magic letters: E, It used to be EFC, Expected Family Contribution. We talked about it again, Student Aid Index. And what does that mean? Student Aid Index is the definition the government— the amount the government thinks you can afford for college per student per year. It's based on income and asset calculation, about 74 factors, but the main factors are mom and dad's income, mom and dad's assets, Students' income, students' assets. There's actually one of my— the funnier questions on the FAFSA is the student married, and I strictly only deal with middle school, high school students, so that we always have to come up— are you married? No. But students' income, students' assets, number of people in household. And if you're going, uh, as of last year, the rule changed. You used to get a discount for having multiple students in one household attending college at one time. But the government thought, colleges aren't making enough money, we're going to take that discount off. So it just keeps getting more and more difficult for you guys. But let's dig a little bit more into the background of this calculation here. There's, again, many ways in reducing what your student aid index is. Similar to tax planning, if you have assets in a checking account, that's going to affect your student aid index a lot differently if it's in a 401 or if it's in an insurance policy or if it's in an annuity product. It doesn't count if it's in certain places and it does count if it's in certain other places. And it's different from family to family. Again, we're offering a discovery meeting. I'll periodically be putting that link. One of the things we do in that discovery meeting is after you book your appointment, simple questionnaire, it's about 10, 11 questions or so. I can calculate what your Student Aid Index is now. And in that meeting, I'll tell you, this is where your assets are counting against you. This is where your assets can be hidden. Is it worth even looking at? Some families, it's a moot point, but we can help you there. So the SAI is unique to the colleges you are applying to. So if you're going to a private school, they're going to look and take your SAI into a completely different consideration than a state school.. And we'll show you some calculations there. You have to apply for it every single year. And so when you're filling the FAFSA out, which is not just your senior year of high school for your freshman year of college, you have to fill the FAFSA out every single year you're going to attend college, at least if you want any sort of scholarships, grant, or aid, or qualify for any student loans. You need to fill the FAFSA out. You are not given your SAI number until about halfway to three-quarters through your senior year. So the order of operations there, if you're a senior, you're going to apply on the FAFSA in the wintertime. So all the colleges you apply for are going to get your FAFSA information, see what your student aid index number is, and then offer you an award letter from there. But that's not going to be until the end of your senior year. So it's as if I equate it to going to a car dealership, picking a car you think looks good. Driving it off the lot and then saying, hey, how much do I owe for that? It's the same thing. You already have the car. You've already applied to the schools. You already done the financial work and you're going to find out how much money you owe for the school later. So again, another benefit of meeting with us. If you come book a discovery meeting, we'll get that out of the way now. We'll tell you upfront, this is what your student aid index is. Look at some of the schools you might think of applying to. And address, you know, a couple examples of what you can expect to be paying for college or what you can expect your financial aid to look like. So let's give an example. Cost of attendance, again, we covered that. It's not just tuition, it's books, fees, room and board, everything under the sun. Student Aid Index, we just covered that. The number the government deems that you can afford equals need. Need is how much aid the family is eligible for. Not guaranteed to get, but eligible to get. So an example, if your cost of attendance, let's say it's at a state school, is $20,000, your student aid index calculated at $16,000, you're eligible for the difference. You're eligible for $4,000 worth of aid. Okay, so let's look into some real examples here. Uh, one of my students, Robert, his parents were separated. And again, if your parents are separated, you only need to put one of them on the FAFSA form. And it's different for every family, but the technical rule is the family that provides— or the family member that provides the most financial support for the, for the student, only in separated households. If you're married, both parents need to be put onto the FAFSA form. Okay, so Robert wanted to study pre-law. He had a 1250 SAT. It's pretty decent. We want higher, obviously, but we're faced with what our test score is. He looked at 11 colleges around the country. His family income was $55,000 a year, but that was not both parents, that was just one. Remember, his parents were separated. When he came to us, he had originally going to fill the FAFSA out with both parents, so that made a drastic difference there. He had $23,500 in an UGMA, and if you're not familiar with what an UGMA is, it's a college student tuition savings account, so to speak, where the money is invested, but once the student reaches, uh, It's in the student's name as the owner. And as I said, any assets in the student's name up to 50% is going to be put into that Student Aid Index calculation. But if it's in mom or dad's name, only 5%, up to 5%. So we change the owner from the student to mom and dad. That changes drastically how it's calculated for your scholarship money. Okay, 5 family members, only one in college. His initial, initial Student Aid Index was $16,211. With just those couple changes, we got it down to $4,176. He received $42,177 total for financial aid at the University of San Diego. Okay, so just little tweaks that make a huge, huge difference because otherwise he would have owed, uh, 4 times the amount of money that he ended up paying for, uh, University of San Diego. Case study number 2. One of my Texas students here, his name's Kevin as well. He wanted to go for business management, 1388 SAT. So better. We're going to qualify for some merit aid at some schools. Some schools, that's not high enough. It just depends. And that's again why it's so important to have a good strategy from Shellee's side. Why are we applying to these schools? Am I a good fit for this college? Can I qualify for merit-based aid? It's a big, big difference maker. Initially, he had only one college pick. He had to go to Baylor. Baylor, Baylor. His dad went to Baylor, his aunt went to Baylor, number one school choice. We told him, Kevin, a horror story, so to speak. We had one student that came in, he came to an initial meeting, and we explained to him— he was a great student, really high GPA, he had a really good resume, his SAT score was off the charts— and he said, you know, I'm only going to apply to one of the Ivy League schools, and he was very dead set, I'm going to apply there. He did not get accepted. And there's a lot of reasons why that might be. A lot of people make the mistake and the assumption, well, I have a good enough GPA, I have a good enough SAT, ACT score, I know I'm going to be accepted. That's not what colleges are looking for. 20 years ago, that might have been the case. It really was GPA, SAT, ACT. If you're good, you're a number, you're going to be accepted. But that's not the case today. They want to know who you are as a student. They want to know if your resume reflects what they believe and what their morals are at their school. They want to make sure that you're a well-rounded person. It's going to reflect— you wear that logo of their college on your chest, that you're going to represent them well. And in the case of the story I was telling Kevin, they weren't doing— he wasn't doing that. So he panicked. And come— this was March or April of the senior year. He comes back to us in panic. I didn't get into the Ivy League school I applied to. Luckily, Shellee talked about admission yield— how many offers were sent out, how many came back as an accepted. We found a few schools that actually didn't have the high percentage that they wanted. Not all the students they thought accepted accepted. So we went back, we got them accepted and a full-ride scholarship to a little school. You might have heard of them— Princeton, right? So it's just all about student positioning. But back to Kevin here, we told Kevin that story. I said, that's great. You want to go to Baylor. I think we have a very good shot at getting you into Baylor. Let's have a backup plan. And he panicked and came back with 24 schools, right? But we got it down to 9. I think 24 is a little overzealous, but nonetheless, family income is almost $500,000 a year. Okay? So again, one of the myths is, oh, I make too much money. I'm not going to qualify for aid. $360,000 was in taxable investments. That means private brokerage accounts, Charles, Charles Schwab accounts, not retirement funds. So meaning not a 401, not an IRA. This was private investments, which counts against you, right? $250,000 in home equity, which originally, again, they were going to claim the equity in the primary household as an investment. But you don't need to do that. That's not included and legally does not need to be included into that calculation. So there are certain assets that I can put your students in or your assets or mom and dad's assets wherever it's parked. To where it's legally hidden from the student aid index. Okay. And they're not risky. You can't lose a dime. You do not lose a penny. You don't lose a penny. Okay. I am not a risk taker. I'm not someone who's going to put people, especially for funds for school, into something that can lose money. But we parked the $360,000 in another place. So for family members, he, he had initial student aid index of $78,452. By just repositioning a couple of assets, applying to the right schools that will give him that aid, we got the SAI down to $11,298. Okay. So again, drastic, drastic change, but really didn't. And honestly, in my opinion, where the $360,000 in taxable investments were parked was risky. He could have lost money. And I'd— and as we can see in the next last 2 years, people have lost 50%. 60% of their total assets and investments. Kevin and his family did not lose a penny. In fact, they had a 5% gain in that $360,000 investment when we put it in 2 years ago. Right. So big difference here. He received $21,975 per year, almost $90,000 total. And we got him accepted to Baylor. Okay. So again, little shifts in money. Everything we just talked about was need-based aid. We said need-based aid, merit-based aid, institutional-based aid. Need-based aid is that calculation. Now let's get into the institutional aid. Institutional aid is going to be broken into two categories. Here we have gift aid, which is self-explanatory— free money. It's money you don't need to pay back. Then we have self-help. Self-help is work-study or student loans. And actually, I want to yield to my college admission expert. Shellee, could you touch on what examples of work study may be?

So work study could be something, uh, so first I will say it's not, uh, everybody gets it. Uh, you have to be strategic. There's only so much of it. Uh, both of my children, um, did work study, and so what that looked like for them is my daughter, she thought it'd be really fun to be that person when I the students check in at the gym, she was the one to check their ID. And so she sat there and she studied and she got to see every amazing person walk through that gym. She loved it, made a ton of friends, and that money that she earned went off of her tuition. My son did tours at Harvard and they were very generous in how much they paid him to do that. And so he used that money to offset. So it's actually doing something at the school that you would enjoy that actually gets taken off your, your tuition.

Right.

So it's something you do have to work for, but it is— it's not granted, it's not automatic. It has to be awarded to you, but it is work, but it goes strictly to lower the cost. Right? And so those are good examples. Let's get into 3 questions. So we're here to help. We come book the discovery meeting. Again, I'll put it in the chat. If you don't want to, that's completely fine. If you're going to do this on your own, 3 questions that you should be asking every single college that you're applying to. All right, question number 1: What percent of need do you meet? So we give the example: cost of attendance minus your student aid index equals need. But not every school is going to just give you 100% of that need. So what percent of need do you meet? Two, what percent of need will be gift aid versus self-help? Because schools are very tricky. They're business. College is a business. They're going to— they're not lying, they're stretching the truth. So they say, oh, we meet 100% of your need, don't worry. If you have a student aid index of $10,000, we're $70,000, we cover 100% of that difference. But where they're sneaky is a percentage of that can be self-help. So those are loans that you will have to pay back or work study that you do have to work for. So it's very important to define what percent will be gifted, what percent will be self-help. How long does it take to graduate? This is a huge, huge oversight. As a financial planner, opportunity cost, if you— is a huge factor. And how are we affected in our retirement? Right? So if every year you're going into school longer is another year that you're paying more money. And what people don't think about, it's another year that your student, or you if you are the student, are not working. So once you graduate, now put a number on how much money you think you can earn with your degree. Is it $30,000? Is it $50,000? So that's one year. Uh, if the school costs $20,000, there's $20,000 there. If you can make $50,000 in your first year graduating, that's $70,000 that you missed out because you didn't pay attention to how long it takes on average to graduate from that school. So very important there. State schools will average 5 to 6 years, private universities 4 to 4.5, and community college 3 to 3.5 years. A lot of families think that the community college route is cheaper, but exactly for the reason I just explained to you. If you're going to a 2-year associate's degree and it's taking you 3 to 3.5 years to get that, and your goal is to transfer to a state school to close the rest of that 4-year degree, and you pick a state school that's 5 to 6 years, you very well can be pushing out your graduation time 3, 4 years. And so are you really saving money, or should you have just gone ahead and spent $20,000 to go ahead and make $100,000 in that 3-year time? And so opportunity cost is, is greatly important there. Let's look into a little case study. We're going to compare neck and neck a state school and a private school. So this is where we're going to get into how do we do a private school for cheaper than the state school. These are real numbers here. So let's— in this study, this student aid index, we're going to assume is $10,000. So let's say average state school is $20,000. Your student aid index is $10,000. The difference, cost of attendance minus student aid index, is the need. So it's— your need is $10,000. At a private school, we're going to use the calculation of $40,000 is the cost of attendance. Again, your student aid index was calculated and will be taken differently depending on what school that we're going to, but stays the same, $10,000. Your need's going to be the difference, so $40,000 minus $10,000 is $30,000. Back to the state school, again, how much percent of need do you meet? Okay, state school is going to meet about 60%. Honestly, that's a little bit higher than what I see. One thing for you Texas students here is admission yield— how many offers were sent out, how many were accepted. Texas schools have no problem getting a high admission yield, so they notoriously do not give out a lot of scholarships. They don't have to, you know, they're a business and people really want to go to those schools. So it could be 40%, could be 50%. Just for the sake of calculation here, we're going to use 60% of the need. Uh, gift aid is going to be 50%. And 50% is going to be self-help. At the private school, they're going to meet 100% of the need in this example. Okay, they meet a very high percent, typically 90, 95, 100. In this example, gift aid is 80%, self-help is 20%. So what do you actually pay if this is the calculation? For the state school, the SAI again is $10,000. The unmet need is going to be $4,000. So $10,000 is the need, and what wasn't met was $4,000. So your total student aid index is going to be the combination of both, of $14,000. All right, total gift aid, which is going to be that 50% of the need, is $3,000. Total self-help, which is going to be 50%, is $3,000. And the total cost of college is $17,000 per year. That's going to total— and again, a state school takes on average 5, almost 5, 5 and a half, or even more years to graduate. So that's $85,000 totals to go and graduate from the state school. That's assuming you don't change your major or you don't get bad grades and everything goes well. So let's go to the private school. Again, your SAI is $10,000. Self-help, which is going to be 20% of the need, is $6,000. Gift aid, which is 80% of the need, which is $24,000. Total cost is going to be $16,000 per year. Again, private schools are closer to that 4-year mark at $64,000. So again, we're cheaper at the private school that's double the cost than the state school. Even if we did 5 years, we're still $1,000 cheaper at the private school, right? So let's look at a real example, uh, hit home for some of the Texas students here. Again, so let's assume a $20,000— double the SAI here— let's assume a $20,000 SAI. The cost of attendance at UT is going to be $32,124. Gift aid would be $5,800. And for merit-based aid, so based on your grades, if you are the top 4% at UT, which is not easy to do, You have to have a high, high GPA, high test score. They're only gonna give you $1,500 if you're in the top 4%. Again, Texas schools do not give out a whole lot of money. Total aid's gonna be $7,300. Total out-of-pocket's $24,824 per year. Okay, let's look at Gonzaga. Gonzaga is $70,000, more than double the cost. Gift aid would be $30,000, assuming the same SAI. Merit-based aid is going to go to almost half of the students, and almost half the students are getting $21,000. Total aid's $51,000, so the total out-of-pocket is $17,722 per year. Again, this is neck and neck, real-life example, real calculation. So it's— I can't stress enough, it's very important. I'm not saying everyone should go to Gonzaga, by the way. There's a lot of variations on what private school and why should we go this private school. What are you talented at? What programs? What minors? What majors? What kind of master's degree, if that's on our goal sheet, should we go to? That's where Shellee Howard can help you. I'm here for the financial side. How can we position you as a family to be best suited for financial aid? So outside of everything we just covered—need-based, merit-based, institutional—the number one way to get additional money is simply ask. And it's like not Oliver Twist, "Please, sir, can I have some more?" It's a very strategic approach. How are we approaching? If your family has $20,000 in medical need or more in a calendar year, you can appeal for additional aid. If you recently lost a job, you can appeal for additional aid. If you recently moved, you can appeal for additional aid. Shellee Howard told you, if you get a big scholarship offer from one school, and the school that you really want to go to did not give it to you, there's a strategic way to approach that. Go to that school and say, hey, you're my number one choice. This is the amount that I was offered here, and see if we can change that and get a matched offer, right? So there's a whole strategy. Again, please come see us if you need any help with that whatsoever, and we'll guide you to the right answer there. So remember Natalie. Shellee took you through Natalie's Pepperdine situation. These— this is a breakdown of the $30,000 that we got Natalie. So Federal Pell Grant, $1,225, that's need-based aid. Okay, Federal Work-Study, she did have to work for that, but that was $1,000. Also, University Alumni Grant is institutional aid of $1,000. Sievert Trust Grant, institutional aid of $600. And the Pepperdine Grant institutional aid, $27,704. I'm laughing a little bit because I did this in a live seminar one time and one of the moms raised her hand. She said, uh, how can I get the Pepperdine Grant? I said, well, where are your students applying? She said UT and A&M. Well, you might want to go to Pepperdine if you want the Pepperdine Grant, right? But every school is going to have their own version of that institutional aid. Okay, so that's just an example of a breakdown of what we can do for you guys. So let's go back. I told you some myths versus reality earlier. Let's cover those myths. My income is too high. I won't qualify. Okay. Again, there's no need-based aid to be had there, but we have merit-based aid and institutional aid. Right. And by the way, if you still have high income, there is a positioning opportunity. And that's what we do in the discovery meeting. Even if you make a half a million, $1 million, $2 million, I can look at it and say, can we position it in a way that legally is calculated for the student aid index so you can still get some extra scholarship? All right, my grades are too low, GPA. Okay, so we might not get merit-based aid, but we have need-based and we have institutional aid, right? So I own a home. At this point, if any of you own or put the equity of your primary household in your FAFSA, it's on you. This is the 4th time we've covered it. Don't do that. Number one mistake most people make there. It's not an investment. If you have rental properties, yes. You do need to put the rental properties. That is an investment. But the primary household, the government says, we're not going to expect you to sell your home to pay for school. So they're not going to count that against you. Biggest mistake on FAFSA. It's an easy process via a high school. Again, counselors are overworked for the private high school. Per 100 students. For the public schools, 400 to 500 students for one counselor. Shellee Howard went over the forms: FAFSA, CSS Profile, SAT, ACT application essay. A big assumption is it's just one essay. It depends on the school. Some schools you might have to write 12, some schools you might have to write 4. And what are they looking for? We can, we can help you there. Book the discovery meeting. We'll talk about those too if that's a concern for you guys. Here's an example of an award letter from USC. I don't know if it's too hard to see on your screen here, but $36,137 is the total cost. We covered more than half the cost with the fall and the spring semester. But when you're applying to schools and you, you do the FAFSA, this is an example of an award letter where all schools who accept you will send you a version of this. And then it's up to you guys to appeal or offer help from us to appeal for you. And then you take all of your award letters and decide what's the best decision for our family, right? So let's go to the next slide here. Okay, a little bit more about appeals. Again, negotiate and appeal your award. There's hundreds of reasons why you can appeal for additional aid. You can do the work on your own. That can be something you study and you work, but it's something we specialize in. And feel free, guys, again, I'll put the link in the chat box here. Please book, come see us. We'd be more than happy to help you guys out there. So a little summary here. Roadmap to financial aid. Institutional aid— we got to pick the right colleges. Not all colleges will meet 100% of that need, and not all of them are going to be a good fit for you. And so if you're picking the wrong one, you can drastically affect where some school you might have been able to go to for free, now you're going to $40,000 or $50,000 because you didn't do the extra work or you didn't look into it a little bit more. We market the student to get the best opportunity. Apply to schools to align with your financial goals. If you're— if your family makes $10,000 a year and you have a 2.1 GPA, I don't know why they'd accept you, but it'd be bad to go to Rice University that cost you $70,000. You can't afford afford it and you're not eligible for aid. So we got to do the financially responsible thing and apply to the schools that make sense for the family. And I promise, there's— as long as your grades are not below 3.0, there's going to be some opportunities out there for you, right? So we advise on the CSS Profile and the institutional aid forms. We advise on the FAFSA and the— also more institutional aid, Student Aid Index Fact Finder. So if you book your appointment Again, simple 10 questions. We'll calculate that SAI for you. We'll tell you if there's anywhere we can put the money that's not going to count against you. And we can say maybe it's a moot point, maybe we're not going to look at need-based aid, but where can we do the merit-based aid and the institutional aid? Or do we need to paint that whole picture entirely? Do you need to help building that resume? That's what we do. Merit-based aid, where can we qualify? Again, SAT, ACT needs to be in the top 50% in the schools you're applying to. If you're just skating by to get accepted, don't expect a whole lot of or any merit-based aid at all, right? So there's a whole strategy behind that.

Shellee? Yeah, so let's do a quick check. You know, you may be wondering, wow, that's a lot of information. But I want you just to take a moment, take a deep breath, kind of just sit with it. So what are the opening and deadline dates for all forms that will qualify you for free money? You may be going, I have no idea. That's probably a scary place to be. What are the 10 most common FAFSA mistakes that will lose you free money? Kevin beat that up and he, he did a really good job at giving you a lot of information. Don't make those mistakes. Oops, there we go. What are the 5 items you need to include in the student essay for the major they are seeking? This is so important. So many times I see students come into my office and they just write random essays. It doesn't make sense when everything they talk about is their love of botany and then they want to be pre-law. It has to make sense. Be mindful of what that looks like. To get your student into the best schools, what are the 3 items to correctly market them in each area? This is important. You can't overlook that these students, we've taught them to be humble. Don't brag, don't boast, don't be that kid. Now I have to pull it out of them and say, What do you mean you're an Eagle Scout? Why didn't you tell me you're an Eagle Scout? It's so important that we do this strategically. So they want to think about the academic fit, the social fit, the financial fit. Do you know how to select the 10 to 12 colleges? How will they compete with each other? How will you know if it's a reach, comfort, or safety? I remember doing this with my firstborn and going, well, where's the chart? Like, I Googled it, and every time I Googled it, it's, it's wrong, it's different. It could be really frustrating, and for that, I'm sorry. Kevin?

All right, so we covered getting accepted, that was the first piece. We covered financial aid, that's the second piece. Now we're going to dig into the funding. This one's a little bit shorter, so I know it's been a long one here, guys, but hang in there with us. We're wrapping up, uh, but the third one is very important, and you can't have any— the full puzzle without any one of these pieces. So I would be remiss if we didn't teach you guys. So funding, cost of college, you guys already know. If you're looking at it, you know that it's expensive and it's only going up, up, up, right? So how can we pay? Out of income, okay? Maybe we're going to pay out of the assets. Or we're gonna borrow. These are the 3 possible ways. Outside of these 3, there is no other possible way to pay for school unless you know some magic I don't know, in which case we'll hire you at our team. We'll bring you in. Okay, so savings. Again, average families only saved about $10,000 to $15,000. To be even frank with my data, with the families I see, it's not even that, at least for specifically for college. The family might save in general but they haven't allocated this specifically for tuition. That's normal. So if you're that family or you're that student, don't feel like you're out of the realm because that's normal, right? 529s— I told you, student aid index, certain assets count against you. 529 accounts count against you. If you don't know what it is, it's the most popular college savings plan, 529 plan. We don't like them. In fact, we get the families out of them as soon as possible, if possible. Sometimes it's sad and it's not possible. But the reason being is Shellee Howard is one of the best in the country at what she does. I am very talented at what I do. Number 2 in the country this year. So if we get that scholarship for you and you have a bunch of money in a 529 account, you're going to have to be penalized, either gift it to somebody or be penalized to take that money out of that account. Okay. So you're, you're punished for saving in a 529 account. Right. Other college savings accounts as well penalized for saving. Again, those accounts count against you in that calculation for student aid index as well as stocks, bonds, and mutual funds. If you have any of those, they're counting against you for borrowing. There's a lot of options for borrowing. Are we going to do subsidized, unsubsidized, student's name, mom or dad's name? Are we going to do private? Are we doing a federal loan? There's not a blanket answer. There's not a this is the loan for everybody. It really depends on your financial standing, right? There's interest fees. I've seen people that already got loans that come into my office with hidden fees and a very— a variation of interest rates that change over time. It's just— there's horrendous— they're allowing— and no offense to my students in here, but you guys are really young— and they're allowing a student who's 17, 18, 19 to sign up for basically a house worth of debt. Hundreds of thousands of dollars you can sign up for by just signing a paper because a college financial aid office told you to do so. Right. And that's not responsible. If— I'll say this, I always like to put the comparison. Most people don't know this, but the IRS will file your taxes for you for free. If you go to the IRS and you don't want to pay for someone to do it, they will do it for free. But do you think they're going to do it in your favor or the IRS's favor? Right? They're going to do it in their favor. They don't want to give you less money that you have to pay them. Same goes for the financial aid office in schools. You go to the financial aid office— colleges are a business. You think they're going to help you to the fullest possible extent to help you not have to pay money to them? Doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Some colleges are different. Some colleges are better than others. But overall, that's what we're looking at. So if we're borrowing, let's say that the school is $20,000 a year for 4 years— freshman, sophomore, junior, senior— that's $80,000 plus interest. People don't understand the interest. Right now, the interest, it can be up to $120,000 to borrow for $80,000, right? Or grants, scholarships and grants. We, again, we hit that hard— need-based, merit-based, institutional-based. So our process with us, what we are going to do. Step 1, lower the cost. We covered all of that. So pick the right school, get the good grades. You need to lower the upfront cost, pick a school that's going to get you and maximize your financial aid, right? Step 2, with our strategy where we can park money, and there's a lot of different vari— variable ways we can do this, but our goal is if you do have any out-of-pocket money that's due, If you have money that you're going to have to come out of pocket, my goal is to refund every dollar, if not even more, back to you for your retirement. I know that sounds crazy, but we're going to cover briefly on how we can accomplish that too. So let's talk about step 1, though, lowering the cost. What's the impact of everything that Shellee does? What's the impact of getting the financial aid, merit-based aid, institutional-based aid? So if we have a $40,000 cost and we're getting some merit institutional need-based aid, let's say you're saving $15,000 per year. So that's a wholesale cost of $25,000, meaning you've done the work, Shellee's helped you close the gap, we've gotten $15,000 discount on the school year. $15,000 times 4 years is $60,000. That means you saved $60,000, six-zero, for your freshman, sophomore, junior, senior year of school. But not just that, if we're investing that money appropriately, we put it somewhere where you can't lose money, it can grow tax-free, and you can use it for whatever purpose you want. That can be easily a quarter million dollars for mom and dad's retirement or your retirement if you're a student that has to fund it on your own, right? So opportunity costs, that's a key term. If you don't know what it is, let's look it up. We talked about it already with how much it would cost you to go to a junior college and how long that takes. But for saving $15,000, that's a lot of money to some people. Some people it's not, but a quarter million dollars, I don't care who you are, that's a lot of money, right? So let's go to a case study. One of our families here, mom and dad had 3 boys, all went to state school. And again, state schools don't give a whole lot of money out, so they didn't get much. They got $2,250 for free, so a total of about $27,000. But we helped save over $95,000 in interest and fees. Okay. And again, we can invest that in places where you can't lose money. And for this particular family, that's $325,000. We got them in future retirement funds for them. So even if you're going to a state school, the opportunity cost on just— I'm going to pick this loan versus this loan because someone else told me to— makes a world of difference. So again, you need to either study on your own or delegate that to someone like us. One of the biggest costs in your life. Okay, so let's talk about the refund. If we have any money coming out of pocket, we want everyone to get that refunded back to you for your retirement. How can we do that? You are financing everything you buy in life. Everything. If you're paying cash, now that cash is gone and you can no longer earn any interest on that money. Okay, if you're borrowing, you're literally paying interest, right? If you go to a bank, if you can't afford a car in cash, you're going to go to a bank, you're going to, you're going to borrow $20,000 for a car. They're not going to just give you $20,000, you pay back $20,000. They want some money for borrowing, lending you that money. It's called interest, right? So if you're paying cash for the car, that money could have been working for you. You could have been gaining interest on that money. Or if you're borrowing money, you're borrowing more than you actually need for the car. So, but there is a better way. Let me get my laser pointer out here for this one. Okay, so I want you guys to understand the black line here, the black line here, and the black line down here all represent $0 financially. Okay, there are 3 kinds of people in this world. There's the spender, the saver, and people who create wealth for themselves, right? So the spender is going to borrow for school. They're going to take a college loan and pay that back. So they're going to have to go back to that zero-dollar financial line. Or they're going to borrow for a car, and they're going to have to pay that back and go back to the zero dollars financially. The saver, who thinks they're a lot better than the spender because they're saving their money, they don't have to borrow, they're going to save, save, save for a car. And again, they're going to pay for it and go back to that $0 line. They're going to save cash for college, pay cash for college, back to that $0 line, right? And so either way, you're losing that money. Either way, you're not gaining interest on that money. What our job as my financial team— again, Shellee Howard is going to help you pick the school. Why are we going to this school? How can we build that passion for purpose? There are very advanced strategies on my end of the business that we can really make a difference for your family. And that's why we're including it here in this presentation. We're going to park your money here, and anytime you need to borrow, you're going to borrow from yourself as opposed to a bank, as opposed to just paying cash out of pocket. So you're going to put the cash here, and when you need to borrow it, that money is still participating in compounding interest. You're still gaining interest. So when you pay that money back, let's say you borrow $10,000. When you pay that $10,000 back, it's actually worth $15,000, $20,000. It's been participating in compound interest the entire time. Right. So we'll teach you guys more about that. If you come into the office, we can meet you where you are. If you really loved what Shellee Howard had to say and that's where your focus needs to be, come talk to us about that. If you want some more financial strategies on how to pay for college, We'll talk to you about that. But the best way to describe what we do— Shellee Howard focuses on what it takes to get into the best fit college. Again, academic, social, financial fit. But the financial fit is going to be on my side. The academic and social fit will be for Shellee's side, right? So what we're focused on, on the financial side, is the return on investment. We don't want you just wasting money paying cash for no reason. Okay, so 5 major areas of expense. So this is just in life in general. Where are we having the major expenses in life? Let me get the laser pointer off here. Oh, it's fine. Okay, so the 5 major areas we have: mortgage. Okay, so most people have a mortgage. Your family probably owns a home. Again, don't claim the equity on the primary household on the FAFSA. But most people have one, and a lot of people are actually paying more than their regular monthly payment, and they think that's the smart thing. We want to pay the house off quickly. Well, I have a few questions for you. If you are doing that, if you are paying more than your monthly payment, does that make the value of your house go up? The answer is no. Is your money easily accessible? If you put more into the equity of your home, can you go get it out of the equity today? No. Right. Does it make your monthly payments go down if you're putting more money? Does it make your monthly payments go down? The answer is no. Why am I telling you this in a college planning process? If you are doing that and you owe money for college, you can— there's smarter ways to be using your money. Stop paying it over here, park it at another place where you can gain interest. And so you are using your money, you're utilizing your assets intelligently. Okay. Taxes. How are you paying taxes? Where are you putting money into retirement plans and how is that taxed? I have a lot of families that come in and say, hey, I'm going to borrow out of my 401 to pay for my daughter's tuition. So, okay, do you know that what happens or how quickly you would need to pay that back if your job were to fire you? She said, no, I don't. Okay. Well, the answer is 30 days. If you're borrowing out of your 401 or your IRA, you lose your job, you have 30 days to pay that back without penalties, fees, and tax. Taxes are huge, right? So qualified plans, those are your retirement plans. Same, same thing with the taxes. You got to understand where's your money going. Is it going to the right place? And if your goal is to really help your students pay for school, then we need to make sure that you're utilizing your money correctly in all assets. College. We already showed you what opportunity costs— we hammered that point. And then major capital purchases, cars, weddings. For those of you who have daughters, or if you yourself are female, uh, we always say weddings are one of the most expensive things possible. You know, my partner in the financial end always tells our clients, elope, elope, elope, save some money there. But one point, last point I want to make here is you have a professional. If you want to go buy a home, you have a professional that's going to help you find one, a real estate agent, right? They handle that. Most people are not just efficient in finding homes and knowing what the mortgage is and what to do. Taxes. A lot of people have tax advisors, tax planners. If you have a 401, someone is running that. You don't just throw money into an account and it just magically goes up or down. Someone is running that. Why would you take one of the 5 major areas of expenses in your life into your own hands if you're not already specializing in that? So seek, seek help, right? Make sure we're doing that correctly. Long-term effects. We want to know where you are for your retirement currently. So that was a little snippet. Well, we have a lot more. And again, I could do a 4-hour presentation strictly on funding. We're not going to do that to you guys today, but I just want to give you guys just a little glimpse. What can we do? What do we do? And what can we continue to help you if you're still interested? So financial analysis, we're going to find your student aid index, tell you if we can lower it, look at what colleges you're interested in. If you want to go to Rice, if you want to go to Harvard, it's going to be extremely different than if you want to go to a local state school. Can your family afford that? Is that the right move? Will you qualify for any financial aid? We can help you there. In order to help you financially, we do full retirement analysis. It's not— again, not just for college, but we got to see, do you make enough income to pay for this school? Is that the responsible thing to do? Are you willing to sacrifice for it? We help you make that decision, right? So college savings alternatives— if you have a 529 plan, there are a lot better opportunities. We'll educate you. We're not someone who'll just say, this is what you should do, this is the best way you should go. Shellee Howard's not that way. I'm not that way. We're going to educate. We're strictly educators. We're going to teach you the options that are out there. We're going to give you our opinion. This is probably the best route you should go. But at the end of the day, it's up to you and your family on what's best for you. Financial implementation. Finally, if we do show you and we do educate you on something you like, we are able to then implement that. For you, right? So I'll give it back to Shellee here.

So to recap, understand the financial aid rulebook and how it applies to you. Remember when we talked about at the very beginning, there's a lot of information out there, but if you don't understand it, please do not just ignore it. Know which schools have money and which do not. I can tell you before you ever apply Where are you going to get the money? I know the most generous schools and I know the stingiest schools. File your forms accurately and on time. I can't emphasize this enough. Many people have their CPA do their taxes and then they try to do their FAFSA, and that doesn't always work out for them. Negotiate with the school or schools when appropriate. Please don't call them up and say, but I need more money. That is not the strategy that's going to get you anywhere. Negotiation is a skill that we can teach you. Be prepared for a last-minute ambush by the school to get you to prove everything. That includes community service hours. Ah, shocker. So we have— we're certifiers for the Presidential Award and the Congressional Award, and that's proof. You may have to show proof, so please do not embellish. Figure out where you're at for retirement and avoid the cost of college ruining it. You will have to retire someday if you choose and/or your body gives out, so please learn the information to make the wise decisions. It's all there. It's just finding it. So the biggest thing I always share with families is start early. I've had people call me when they get pregnant. I really have. And, and we have fun with it, and we talk about preschool and putting money in the right places and, and so on and so forth. And use professionals. Use people who understand. Not every CPA understands that you can use your IRA to park your rental property. There's a lot you can do, and we can show you how. Work with, you know, people like us. We're former admissions— or my team has former admissions officers. We're all certified guidance counselors. We understand the strategic enrollment manager's role, and we're educational consultants. We need to determine which colleges students want to go to. You know, we spend hours preparing for college, and yet most people throw darts at the dartboard. It's dangerous. So if you would like our assistance, I highly encourage getting on a discovery call where we, Kevin and I, can evaluate, is your child ready for college academically, socially, and fi— financially. We can show you how to maximize. We can show you how to find your SAI, lower it. We can show you how to navigate your investments and your opportunities. I have so many people raise their hand, how do I get rid of my 529? It's not that easy. Be very careful. Plan now. Honest to goodness, the more you start, the earlier you start, the more money you are going to save. Understand, if you want scholarships, you have to take a test. They just don't throw money at you. In 2021 to '23, our students earned $22.3 million in scholarships. We know how to get you the money. You just need to know how to do it. So takeaways. It's so important. Do you know how you're gonna fund college? Are you gonna pay as you go? Are you gonna pull money? Will grandparents help? And even if they do, don't have them put money in the student's name. Are loans good? Are they good, better, and best? Are you prepared? These are all things I want you to think about. The first option is denial. I don't want my child to leave. Let's just pretend this is not happening. Probably not a good strategy. Then we have the families who just put their head in the sand. If I just don't know it's there and I just ignore it, it'll all work out on its own. Your student may get into college, but they may be using your retirement to do it. The do-it-yourself approach. Don't know how many times I've been burned by this myself. It sounds like I can do it. Remember when I said I spent 30 hours a week on top of my full-time job for 4 years? That's what happens when you do it yourself. And then using experts, you know, College Ready, we've been at this for a very long time, and our consultants are the best in the business. We have partnered with the financial side, Kevin and his team, because it takes all of it. You have to get in and then you have to pay for it wisely. You know, when I Googled how to pay for college, it was out of control how bombarded I was. You have to be mindful that Google has millions and billions of inquiries about this subject. If you Google why your thumb hurts, you can find out it may be because of cancer. Please do not Google your child's future. Back to the blind spots. I hope now your eyes are wide open. You are filled with knowledge, or at least enough to know you need help. We've showed you how to understand the process, how to not count on just guessing, but now it's truly up to you. Our College Planning Services are there for you. We guide your student how to find the best colleges, ensuring that they get accepted. Remember, your child only gets one shot at this. We get parents free money. My All 4 of my kids have done it, and over the years, so many of my students have done it. We show parents how to fund it. If your student is not a merit type student, there is independent scholarships, but be careful, those can get you in hot water. I'm so sorry we couldn't get into those today, but I can help you on another call. There are actually 67 steps If that doesn't overwhelm you, think about each and every one of them, how you can make a mistake. This is who we work with: students and parents that are motivated. If your student sits there and crosses their arms and says, "I don't want to go to college," it's not a good fit for us, and we will wish them well, give them resources for other options. We want to work with families who want to work with us. Students and parents that are serious about a college degree and, and career placement, student and parents who want real expert advice from former admissions and financial aid officers, parents are serious about their money and retirement, parents and students who don't want to procrastinate about the entire process.

Okay, so this is our process. You guys have been in the Enlightenment Experience, okay? That's the education strictly. This is what you should be having your eyes on. Step 2, if you are interested, again, we put in the chat box and we'll also send you guys an email, uh, an offer. Come to the Discovery Meeting, uh, we can have you ask all your questions, we'll answer, uh, we'll give you some extra strategies. If you don't want to continue working with us, that's okay, but we'll say, hey, Here's some 10 things that you need to work on. But if you do want to work with us, every single student is going to have their own unique plan. That's going to be the strategic design. But every student's going to need to plug that plan into 67-step process. Then we're going to need to implement the plan. Uh, you guys are always invited to Advanced Education if you're interested. Again, this is only college planning. Uh, we teach a number of other financial courses. Shellee Howard has a lot of different active monthly calls and webinars. She'd be glad to hook you in on the college side as well. Okay, and then the discovery meeting. So what we're offering, and then we'll hand it back to Nabila here in a minute, uh, discovery meeting analysis. What we do again, we're going to calculate your SAI. So once you book the appointment, quick little 10-questionnaire, uh, we'll give you strategies. Can we lower it and maximize your need-based aid? We're going to give you a platform. Ask us all questions you will have. Love to have you in there. Both students and parents are recommended to attend. Oftentimes students come in and I ask a question, and the way that they answer, the parents kind of look at each other and say, well, that's not what they told us. And so it's good to have an outside perspective sometimes. We'll give you— and Shellee Howard will give you additional strategies on acceptance, you know, Is my resume good right now? Do I need more? Where is it going to— we'll give you some additional strategy there, additional strategy on financial aid, and then again, additional strategies on funding. We're going to go over how our services can continue to help. So we have, you know, certain packages that focus on what you need. We'll explain that to you. If you'd love to, we'd love to have you. So if you want to move forward, we can do that. If not, we'll say that's fair. But here's 10 things I think that you should definitely focus on if you're going to work on your own. Again, both parents and students recommended to attend. My firm is our fee advisors. We are $400 an hour on the financial side, but because Nabila invited you guys and you guys came here today, we are going to offer that specifically for your group at $97 cost. Okay, typically we book— we want you to book within the next couple weeks, but We'll leave it open if you guys have things. I know we're approaching school starting and families are busy, so, but we'd love to have you guys in there. And again, it says limited spots. Typically we do, but this is our first one in a while, so we are pretty open at this time. We did mention that we have a scholarship offer for you guys at the beginning, and if you hung out to the end, that we give you that. So there's 3 puzzle pieces to this. Shellee Howard really hones in on getting accepted and getting financial aid. My side is really how will you pay. And again, I don't just tell you, I don't say this is what you should do. My job is to educate, and that education process is rigorous and takes hours. The cost of that, how will you pay, is $1,500 where we start, or more, right? That's just the beginning package, but it's strictly educational. I am going to give that to one person for free today. Right. And this is how you will qualify. So if you book the discovery again, link is in the chat box here. I just put it one more time. If you book within the next 24 hours and you submit the SAI Fact Finder, which will come right after you book your appointment within the next 24 hours, we're going to randomly select one family to get educated and do the How Will You Pay package. Typically, we'd like to get a picture with you guys if you can. That's a stipulation there. But either way, we just want to help. We want to give as much, you know, this is a business, so we do charge for what we do. Hopefully you guys learned a lot today, and we can answer even more questions and help you further in the discovery meeting. Shellee Howard, did you have one more thing before we hand back to Nabila? You're on mute. There you go.

Thank you. Okay. Oops, gotta go back now. So the final thing I want to leave you with is this: it is possible. So much on social media, so much on the internet is, it's so negative, and I want to give you some inspiration You know, I wrote a book on how to send your student to college without losing your mind or your money because I lost a bet, really. And the bet was with my son, my firstborn. When he got into Harvard and he graduated without debt, I told him that I would write a book. Well, when he crossed the stage and graduated, he handed me his diploma and he says, Mom, where's the book? So I do have a bestselling book, and at minimum I would be happy to share a copy with you. But I put this slide up here as a celebration and an encouragement. We're here because we want you to be successful, just like my kids were. People want to say there is no money, scholarships are hard. I'm here to tell you it's not as bad as they make it sound. And we know where the generous colleges are. So please be encouraged. Meet with us so I can help you understand if you're college ready, and Kevin can help your family understand if you're financially ready. So back to you, Nabilia.

Thank you guys so much for that. I was honestly— it was actually really good, and I got so much information on it. And I wanted everyone— I wish I said this in the beginning— but everyone in here to kind of send their email, because if they send their email, I can provide them with future resources and future links. And if you did miss any part of this session, I'm going to have a follow-up session, which is in the flyer that all of you got, which is going to kind of have the same information. So like Kevin said earlier, if there was internet issues or anything like that, I will be able to send out the recording of this session or have that session for you. And I hope this kind of just made you guys learn, like, how to do it the most efficient efficient way to get it— not only get into college, but to also get into your dream school and pay for it efficiently with your parents and kind of figuring everything out. And I know it did take a minute, the session was kind of long, but I hope it was really informational. And I wanted to thank you guys all for attending, and please put your email in the chat box so I can take it and email you guys with future resources.

All right, well, thank you guys, and, uh, hopefully we'll We'll see you guys in a discovery meeting, but have a good day.

Bye everyone. Bye.