By Nicholas Blake

           There are many things as a college student one must keep track of; one of those happens to be the FAFSA. This is the financial aid that one would apply for to help with the cost of college and there are few things that one must keep a look out for like the deadlines for the FAFSA and the paperwork requested by the financial aid department. Many states and colleges use the FAFSA to determine eligibility for nonfederal student aid funds that may have early deadlines or limited funding. The sooner you complete the FAFSA the more aid you could be eligible for.

• PROMISE Scholarship: March 1, 2019. New applicants must submit additional forms at cfwv.com. Contact your financial aid administrator or your state agency.
• WV Higher Education Grant Program: April 15, 2019

The federal deadline is your last chance to submit the FAFSA each year. If you need financial aid for the 2018-19 school year, you can submit the form until June 30, 2019. Work-study dollars and most state and institutional aid will run out the fastest for 2018-19, but there will still be time to qualify for federal grants and student loans. Even if you wait until June 30, you can receive these grants and loans retroactively to cover what you’ve already paid for the spring and fall semester.

In past years, if you or your family had not yet filed your tax returns for the previous year when you submitted your financial aid application, you had to use estimates and go back later on to submit the actual figures. But that all changed thanks to executive action taken by President Barack Obama on September 13, 2015. Instead of waiting until you and/or your parents have completed your tax returns for the previous year, you will now complete the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or the FAFSA, using information from two years prior. This has internally made the extraction of you and your parent’s tax information so much easier due to the Data Retrieval Tool. So remember students keep on top of your deadlines especially this one because it is in some cases the livelihood of some students, so keep up the good work and file that FAFSA.