My granddaughter is filling out college and scholarship forms and my wife and I are faced with a question. When filling out financial forms they ask for income for parent or adoptive parent,and we are neither. My wife was appointed legal guardian. Please help us answer the question as there is no place for "legal Guardian". Mike

Welcome to the world of college applications and financial aid forms!

Your best bet might be to call the guidance department at your granddaughter's high school and ask your question.

I found this at http://www.finaid.org/educators/pj/halfsupport.phtml:

With regard to legal guardians, there is an asymetric relationship. A legal guardian does not count as a parent for federal student aid purposes, per the discussion under Who counts as a parent? on page AVG-26 of the 2007-08 verification guide:

A foster parent or a legal guardian is not treated as a parent for FSA purposes. If the student's parents are dead, he is independent. Otherwise, a dependent student must report information about his parents even if he has a legal guardian, unless the school has a documented reason to perform a dependency override.

If a student is living with her grandparents or other relatives, the same principle applies. Unless the relatives have adopted the student, their income should not be reported on the FAFSA as parental income. Any cash support from persons other than the student's parents should be reported as untaxed income, as discussed in Step 2. The school may also consider other kinds of support as part of the student.s financial resources and use professional judgment to include the support under the item for student.s untaxed income (see Chapter 5 on professional judgment).

Any support the student receives from his or her legal guardians gets reported on Worksheet B, but the student does not list them as parents on the FAFSA.

This information is repeated on this site (FAFSA and Pell Grants | The Heart Of The Financial Aid Process). Scroll down for the dependent student information.

Does this help and answer your question? If not, please let us know.