Determining COA Forum

[JamesMcGillEsquire]

For folks who have already been through a year of law school, at what point in the year were you able to figure an accurate cost of attendance? Because without knowing where I'm living it seems very difficult to determine exactly how many loans I have to take out.

Also I have no idea about how much money I'll need for food and other miscellaneous expenses. Like it could be $2000 a semester, it could be $5,000, there are a lot of variables and unknown unknowns here. For the most part it seems schools use high end estimates when making their "student budgets" for the academic year, so I'm interested to hear from people who have already navigated this process. At one ASW a financial aid officer said you can adjust your loans during the year if you realize you borrowed too much, is this a common practice?

Also when do we need to tell the financial aid office how much money we need to borrow? By May? August?