the whole fafsa system is such garbage this year!!! they remove questions without telling anyone, the website crashes constantly, and when you finally submit everything they take FOREVER to calculate your SAI. i submitted in JANUARY and still don't have a final SAI number. how are we supposed to make college decisions like this???

Just wanted to update and thank everyone for the helpful responses! I contacted my daughter's financial aid office directly and they confirmed that the scholarship question was indeed removed from the new FAFSA. They also said that since her scholarship was non-taxable and paid directly to the school, there's nothing additional we need to report. Such a relief! They mentioned they're getting tons of calls about "missing questions" from people familiar with the old FAFSA format.

Just wanted to update everyone! My ex checked this morning and the tax information magically appeared! It looks like it did eventually link automatically through the IRS DRT tool, even though it initially said it couldn't. We're so relieved - the SAI calculation is now complete and everything looks correct. Thanks for all the advice!

man i wish id seen this thread last week!! spent like 3 hours trying to figure out why my wifes tax info disappeared from our daughters fafsa. ended up starting over completely and lost all our previous info. the whole system is trash tbh

OMG yes they need to invite u again every year and make sure ur using the EXACT same email address as last year!!! We made that mistake where my daughter invited me with my gmail instead of my work email that I used before and it created this WHOLE mess where I had two different contributor profiles and the system got all confused and we had to start over 😫

Just to clarify one more thing - when your student sends the contributor invitation this year, you'll have 14 days to complete your section before the invitation expires. They can always resend it if needed, but it's good to be aware of that timeline.

UPDATE FOR EVERYONE: The Department of Education just announced yesterday that they're aware of this notification glitch and are working on a fix. According to their statement, applications that appear complete when you log in ARE actually complete in their system, and the notifications can be ignored. They expect to resolve the issue within 2 weeks. In the meantime, they recommend checking your actual application status by logging in rather than relying on the automated notifications.

UPDATE: Problem solved! After manually going through every section again and hitting the final submit button (which I had missed before), the system finally acknowledged everything as complete. The notifications stopped after about 24 hours, and we received our SAI calculation this morning. For anyone else experiencing this - make sure you hit that final submit button after the IRS data retrieval, even if all sections show complete with green checkmarks!

I'm confused about how everyone's submitting FAFSA so early. Aren't we supposed to wait until we have our taxes done for the year? I'm still waiting to file mine. Am I behind the curve here?

Adding to the helpful advice here - while adding W&M won't impact your daughter's existing FAFSA submissions, it's worth noting that W&M calculates their Student Aid Index (SAI, formerly EFC) using both the FAFSA and the CSS Profile. If you haven't submitted the CSS Profile to W&M yet, you should do that immediately, as their institutional aid calculations rely heavily on it. Also, after adding W&M to the FAFSA, I'd recommend emailing their financial aid office directly to confirm they received her information. Include her full name and student ID in the email. This creates a paper trail and helps ensure nothing falls through the cracks during their busy season.