the Tuition and Fees Calculator

University of Phoenix Material

Education Funding Worksheet Instructions

You will be completing the Education Funding Worksheet for this assignment. Here are the steps involved and resources to help you find amounts.

The first four questions refer to how you paid tuition and fees this year. If you have your financial aid award letter or a financial plan you created with your advisor, you can refer back to that. Or you can create an educational financial plan by completing steps 1, 2, and 3 in the Tuition and Fees Calculator at www.phoenix.edu/financialplanassignment.

If you are unsure about the amount you borrowed this year, log in to www.nslds.ed.gov to see all your federal student loans. You can also contact your University of Phoenix finance advisor.

After you input lines 1-4, you may see an Unfunded Tuition Cost in line 5. If there is an unfunded amount, you will need to look into other funding options to make up the shortfall.

Questions 6 and 10 might encourage you to look for non-loan funding. These questions are included to get you thinking about other options to pay for college that do not need to be repaid. Research dollars might be available to you. Think about what you learned on iGrad. Another resource is http://www.phoenix.edu/tuition_and_financial_options/financial_options.html.

The next section focuses on loan and repayment. Your goal should be to borrow no more than what you expect your starting salary to be once you leave school. You can look up typical starting salaries for your chosen career at the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics website (www.bls.gov). Or go to phoenix.edu and check out the Phoenix Career Guidance System.

If your total student loan debt will be more than your anticipated starting annual salary, that may signal trouble when you start repaying your loans. Here are some logical steps you can take to make sure you graduate with manageable student loan debt:

· Commit to spending at least five hours each month looking for and applying for scholarships for the coming year.

· Start saving a small amount now in a separate savings account. Head back to the cash flow statement from Week 1 and see if you can make a few spending tweaks to free up more money for tuition. Could you find $50 more each month to put toward tuition? Every little bit helps to get you on the path to saving.

The challenge is to make sure that you borrow an amount that is manageable. Even good debt can turn bad if you have trouble keeping up with the repayment. If you have additional questions, or would like to discuss options for or changes in your current financial aid plan, contact a University of Phoenix finance advisor.

The last step is to find the standard monthly payment for the amount you expect to borrow. A general rule of thumb based on recent interest rates is that your payment will be $10 for every $1,000 you borrow. For example, if you borrow $10,000 your payment will be approximately $100. To get a more definitive amount, you can log in to this site to use the Repayment Estimator and it will use your NSLDS loan data: https://studentaid.ed.gov/repay-loans/understand/plans.