Someone else paying tuition - does it affect us?

amother

Tue, Aug 27 2013, 4:08 pm

am I understanding this correctly? My neighbor can have college tuition gifted to them, $10,000 pieces of furniture, etc etc etc and be on food stamps, and I can't afford tuition or furniture and am not on food stamps?

There are no limits to what/ what kinds of gifts you can receive and receive food stamps?

Does anyone else think this is super shady?

If you're on food stamps, you can't afford tuition. If a relative wants to help you, why not help pay for food so you can get off food stamps?

If you're on food stamps, you can't afford fancy furniture. If a relative wants to help you, why not pay for food so you can get off food stamps?

I don't get it.

Peanut2

Tue, Aug 27 2013, 4:50 pm

They aren't helping you. They are paying college tuition.

It's not gifted to them. It is paying tuition.

It's just the way it is.

There clearly are limits to what kind of gifts do and do not count.

But if a relative wants to help then giving their old furniture is better than giving a monthly stipend, it seems.

TwinsMommy

Tue, Aug 27 2013, 6:04 pm

if someone were paying my college tuition, yes, they'd be helping ME. If THEY didn't pay for it, I'd have to. The question is if someone is on food stamps is this the right time to get an expensive college degree-- whether someone else wants to pay or not.

MaBelleVie

Tue, Aug 27 2013, 6:06 pm

TwinsMommy wrote:

Sometimes you have to make a less optimal short term decision in favor of a wise long term plan.

causemommysaid

Tue, Aug 27 2013, 7:19 pm

amother wrote:

they will get off food stamps faster if they have a college degree.

besides your opinions on if its right or wrong are not really relevant since its either legal or its not. nothing shady about it.

amother

Tue, Aug 27 2013, 8:24 pm

amother wrote:

I am OP.
There is an adage or something that goes "Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach him to fish and he will eat his whole life, and feed his family too, and maybe even feed you when you're too old and feeble to fish." There is also a principle in Jewish law (yes law, not custom) that the highest form of charity is to help someone support themselves, as opposed to just giving them what they need directly. We would never have thought to take food from our relatives, but they saw our situation and said to DH "Please go to college so you can stop shvitzing at dead-end jobs that will never be enough. Your family should not have to suffer because your parents were too dysfunctional to provide you with a trade."

I have no idea where you're getting this fancy furniture idea from. Our tiny apartment is furnished with bare basics that we picked up secondhand almost all for free, and we built our kitchen ourselves (literally. Bought planks of wood and hardware. It was fun, actually.) Our appliances are 50 years old, the same ones that were put in originally when our apartment was built and have been through I don't know how many owners, and I thank G-d every day I wake up and they're still working. Until this, nobody has given us a cent since our wedding gifts, and we worked hard to provide for ourselves. We only went on food stamps in the first place when one of us was out of work for half a year for health reasons. Then as our family was growing (and I'm not even talking about having more kids but about the existing ones getting bigger and needing more) and our expenses growing, we chose not to go off of food stamps voluntarily until we disqualify, but to use the time that we're on it to prepare to be in a better place when we get off. I think that's what the program was ideally intended for in the first place, to help people get on their feet and not need it anymore. Not sure how much that actually happens, but it is what we're doing.

Tuition is not actually all that expensive at this point. I'm not going into our personal specifics, but just for the purpose of example, city colleges in NY (out of town is probably cheaper, but I wouldn't know) cost about 6,000 per year, and we qualify for some scholarships. That's pretty comparable to our food expenses, except as alluded above food disappears once eaten while the college degree would enable us to have a better future for many years, G-d willing. Good investment on the part of relatives who wouldn't want to see us going farther and farther downhill and needing more handouts. We probably would have taken out loans to do it ourselves (and might need to later on, the relatives didn't commit to anything long term)

BTW if you qualified for food stamps, you would not be able to afford many other things, forget fancy furniture or high tuitions. The level of qualifying for food stamps is not the kind of money that anyone can live high on. Don't be too jealous.

amother

Tue, Aug 27 2013, 10:07 pm

If you qualify for food stamps and medicaid, don't you qualify for full financial aid scholarship? Have you tried applying, fafsa?

amother

Tue, Aug 27 2013, 11:30 pm

amother wrote:

If you qualify for food stamps and medicaid, don't you qualify for full financial aid scholarship? Have you tried applying, fafsa?

We qualify for financial aid but not full. The financial aid makes it a lot more manageable (for whoever pays) but it will still be several thousand dollars per year.

BTW on a related note, I was totally thinking of this while reading the thread about spending a child's inheritance on their wedding without them realizing. Because certain types of financial aid for school is limited and a bunch of DH's was used up on his post-high-school yeshiva tuition. As a yeshiva bochur dependent on his parents he had no clue about this. He PROBABLY at the time would have chosen to do beis medrash anyway but I still feel frustrated that he and probably 99% of yeshiva bochurim had no part in the discussion, it's treated as default in the yeshiva world that you go from high school to beis medrash, which 17-year-old kid is thinking about who's paying and how it will affect them 10 years later when they have a family to support? Gr. The icing on the cake is that after using all his federal pell grants up, the yeshiva won't even release his college credit transcript because the balance of his tuition was never settled. If he actually needed those credits I would be raising heck at that yeshiva sometime around now, but B"H he has enough credits from other places to do the program he wants. I just totally hijacked my own thread but had to get that out! People, make sure your kids understand their money and that stuff in life costs money! DH is not stupid at all but he was just moved through this automatic system and never knew there was anything to think about until it was too late. Boggles my mind.

anon for this

Tue, Aug 27 2013, 11:32 pm

The added earning capacity that OP's DH will iy"H have because of his degree means that OP's family will pay much more in taxes over his career than they would've had he not earned the degree. In fact, I'd guess that the difference in taxes will be orders of magnitude larger than the cost of providing OP's family with Medicaid/ food stamps while her DH is earning that degree.