Deductions & credits

@Anhixenbaugh 

If you already filed your return, there is nothing you can do but wait. If it causes a delay with your refund there’s nothing you can do about it.

 

On one level, I would not amend. I filed an amended return two years ago that took a 11 months to process, even though the claimed time is 4-5 months.  And, you can also use a Pell Grant for necessary educational expenses like textbooks. If the IRS were to send you a letter telling you that you forgot to report your Pell grant and that you owe income tax on the $29, you could reply with a letter of explanation and receipts showing that you spent more than $29 on books.

 

On the other hand, there is a trick — not exactly a loophole — that might allow you to get a bigger tax refund for yourself by changing the way you report the Pell Grant.  With a Pell Grant, you have the choice of applying it to tuition or to living expenses. If you apply it to living expenses, then you can use the $800 of tuition that you paid to claim a tuition tax credit.  Even if you live at home with your parents, your school financial aid office probably has a dollar figure that will be acceptable to the financial aid bureaucracy and the IRS as living expenses for their students.

 

In this case, you are probably not a full-time student so you cannot claim the AOTC, but you could claim the lifetime learning credit, which I believe is 20% of the tuition. That means you would get an additional $200 refund.  Here is an IRS fact sheet on this option.

https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-utl/Pell%20AOTC%204%20pager.pdf

 

If you wanted to do this, you still need to wait until your first tax return is processed and whatever refund you claimed has been paid, then you could prepare an amended tax return to report the Pell Grant, the 1098-T, and claim the tuition credit. I would still expect that it could take up to a year for the amended return to actually be processed.

 

The person who is most qualified to help you navigate this process in TurboTax is @Hal_Al