my daughter's financial aid advisor told us the whole system is still buggy. even if everything looks fine now, print out confirmation pages of EVERYTHING and keep checking the status every couple weeks. my niece thought her fafsa was all done but then 2 months later got an email saying there was a problem with the parent section that needed fixing.

To provide some additional clarity: Under the FAFSA Simplification Act, the 2025-2026 application simplifies the parent contribution process for married couples filing jointly. When spouses file taxes jointly, the primary financial information is collected from whichever parent was entered first in the application. The system generates an accurate Student Aid Index (SAI) calculation using the household's joint tax information without requiring both parents to individually submit information. Your daughter's application is processing correctly based on what you've described.

It should transmit to schools automatically based on the ones she listed on the FAFSA. We're still waiting for her financial aid packages though - that's another waiting game altogether!

Thanks! At this point I just want to get through the first waiting game before I start worrying about the second one 😅

dont 4get to check if her major has any special scholarships!! my roomate got 3500 just for being in the engineering department but she had to ASK nobody told her about it lol

One final note: if you do end up needing private loans, having a cosigner with excellent credit can significantly reduce the interest rate - sometimes by 2-3 percentage points. Also, look for lenders that offer cosigner release after a certain number of on-time payments (usually 24-48 months). This allows your daughter to take over the loan independently once she has established her own credit history, which removes your liability.

Thank you everyone for all this helpful info! I just created an account on studentaid.gov and started my FAFSA application. You were right that it's pretty straightforward once you're on the official site. I'm going to ask my financial aid office about workshops too. Really appreciate all the advice - this has been stressing me out for weeks!

Great job taking action! One last tip: create an FSA ID for both yourself and your parent (if you're a dependent student) before starting the actual FAFSA. It can take 1-3 days for the IDs to be fully activated, and you need them to sign electronically. Good luck!

Have you verified both you and your daughter have valid FSA IDs that are properly linked to the application? This was the issue with my son's application. Even though we both had FSA IDs and thought they were connected to the application, there was some kind of verification problem that prevented the final submission. When we finally got through to someone at FSA, they explained that both FSA IDs needed to be fully verified through the email confirmation process AND linked to the specific application. In our case, I had created a new FSA ID (forgot my old one) but the system was still trying to use my old one for verification purposes. I would recommend checking both FSA ID accounts separately to confirm verification status before trying anything else. The sign and submit button won't appear if either account has verification issues.

Just following up to see if any of these suggestions helped resolve your issue? The deadline for many schools' priority financial aid is approaching, so I wanted to check if you were able to make progress.