Do your kids have income taxes? They could claim the AOTC each year instead and you just have to give up the $500 other dependent credit. If they don't have enough for the credit, then you could shift some low basis stock that you wanted to sell anyway into their name and have them sell it (and use it to pay for college while paying no or almost no taxes).My personal situation is that all 3 of my kids will be in college this fall, and since our oldest started school my spouse and my income is nearly phased out for AOTC. Good that our income is higher, but we could still use the help and were counting on this 30k. Now with the FAFSA changes we don't get consideration for having multiple children in school either. Other programs have inflation based income limits, like Roth eligibility increasing, contributions for it and HSA increasing, etc. I believe the phase out range for AOTC hasn't changed in over a decade, maybe even since 2009? So $2500 doesn't go near as far and income of 160k-180k is vastly different as well. I utilize retirement accounts as much as I can to keep our agi lower, but that hurts take home which we need to cash flow. I just don't understand why education credits are static, and why there isn't more of an uproar. I've searched online and hard to find similar sentiments. Perhaps Ed credits aren't for folks like me but they would've been like 15 years ago? Doesn't seem right.
anyway afaik I've never seen someone here self-identify as a congressperson or staff, so this rant won't do that much. But I hear there's a big rewrite of the tax cuts this year - good time to shoot off a letter to your Rep.
Statistics: Posted by bongo — Tue Jan 28, 2025 7:13 pm