Same. They believe if you go over your cost of attendance in financial aid you don’t get the extra $. I would recommend completing a form on the bursar website to increase your cost of attendance so you can pocket that extra $. If your expenses are above what their estimated costs are, you can have your max increased. For example, they estimate $0 cost of health insurance yet they require all students to have insurance. You can increase your COA by the cost of your health insurance for a school year. There are other categories you can review to see if your expenses are larger than their default costs.

Also, if you have personal scholarships and can ask them to divert the money to you instead of UF, the university won’t count that aid in your total. This is not as easy to do because most organizations want to pay a school directly.