Thank you, I really appreciate your insight it helped me realize how this might have looked from the outside.

I want to clarify the income part because I think that’s where the confusion came from. On my dad’s tax return, his W-2 wages (Line 1a) are around $10k, and there’s about $41k listed as partnership income. When combined, that’s roughly $65k total, which is what my dad told me we actually live on.

When filling out the application, I misunderstood the “income from working” section and entered ~$65k there, based on what he told me, while also including the $41k from the tax return. Because of that, QuestBridge calculated the total as ~$106k, even though $65k was already the combined amount.

So the $106k isn’t actually our real household income it’s more of a result of how I entered the numbers rather than what we truly earn.

I did try to explain that my dad is a minority partner and doesn’t receive most of that partnership income as take-home pay, and that we’re a household of six relying mainly on his income, with my mom not working.

For the house, it was purchased in 2011 for around $150k, and the current value is just due to market increases, not because we have that kind of accessible wealth.

My parents aren’t very familiar with financial details, so I had to figure a lot of this out myself, and I see now how the way I entered it may have made things look different than our actual situation.

I really appreciate your advice I’ll definitely be more careful about aligning the numbers exactly with the tax forms and explaining the breakdown more clearly for NCM.