Thanks, Joachim, and thanks to LSE Cities and Alfred Herrhausen for the invitation. Super happy to be here, very surprised. I usually, at previous urban age conferences, say outrageous things, and they keep on inviting me back, so I'm not exactly sure how to be even more outrageous. I'll try again. But I'm a little bit thrown off my game. Alcindor has kind of given me a moment of psychic breakthrough. I've always been struggling to understand this liminal condition that I feel, that I didn't have a name for, being determined not to grow up or not to feel like an adult. So thank you, Alcindor. I'm in this moment of weighthood. It's good to know. So we've got a fantastic overview in the last two presents, while the last presentation, and Rick is in particular, that gives us an understanding of the scale, the scope, the complexity, and to be frank, the overwhelming nature of what we have to get our minds around. And it's complex. It's enormous. There's maybe two things that I'd like to add to that picture. And the one is that a lot of this growth is actually happening in very small towns and cities, and intermediary cities is a big part of the story, even though our default position is to be drawn to the Johannesburgs, the Kampalas, the Addis of the world. But if we are going to really grapple with these questions over the next two days, we have to also foreground the specificities of the smaller places, the smaller towns. The second issue I want to flag is just this very peculiar geography of sort of, particularly in West Africa, that incredible concentration across the region, all the way from Dakar right into Brazzaville. That's a very specific kind of conurbation. And surely this represents important questions for regional governance, for trans-border urban or metropolitan governance. What does that mean? How do we build a language for that? Moving on, the second sort of point of differentiation to just again remind ourselves of is that the different regions of the continent are not in the same stage at all. In fact, if we look at North and Southern Africa, the urban transition is more or less, I guess, where Asia is at. It's sort of starting to plateau. But in Eastern and particularly Western Africa and Central Africa, we will see the doubling of urban populations in a relatively small space of time. And it is mostly those countries and economies that have the GDP per capita that we've just heard in the previous presentation. So again, there's something specific to those regions that we have to get our heads around. This is an attempt by the OECD and the African Development Bank and UNDP in 2016 to help us with this problem of differentiation. We're dealing with 54 countries in an enormously diverse continent. And what they try and do in this typology is to put urbanization, fertility transitions and the structural transformation, in other words, the state of these economies in the same frame. And then we're kind of going down very different paths. So again, just a reminder that when we are grappling with what the solutions, the responses, the policy menus might be, that they will, by definition, have to be very different things in these different places. So these are all caveats. And what strikes me is that when I look across these reports, the research, the data and so on, is how this translates into the public domain. So this is a recent article from this year by a very significant journalist from The Guardian newspaper. And this is what he writes, Kinshasa had just 20,000 people in 1920. By 1940, it was home to about 450,000 people. Today, it has possibly 12 million and it's predicted to be Africa's second largest city with 75 million people inside of 50 years. By Western standards, it is a dysfunctional, sprawling megalopolis ring by vast shanty towns of informal settlements, their infrastructure non-existent and all collapsing. More informed urban observer, Rob Muga, says the following. Africa's not prepared for this urban explosion. That's us. By 2025, there will be 100 African cities with more than 1 million inhabitants according to McKinsey, who's also in the room, I believe. That's twice as many as in Latin America. A runaway urbanization and a growing youth bulge with most young people lacking meaningful job prospects is a time bomb. Already some 70% of Africans are under 30, youngsters account for roughly 20% of the population, 40% of the workforce and 60% of the unemployed. Now, these dystopian references matter because what they do is they prepare the ground for very truncated policy responses. So to arrest this complexity, to arrest this overwhelming chaos that is going to engulf us, we have to residue A, B and C and we've got to do it in a particular way. So it is very interesting if we go back to the first urban age conference in Africa in Johannesburg in 2006 and we look at the arc to today, there's been a sea change in the policy landscape. In 2006, you could not get a pan-African politician for level money to talk about urbanization. It was just not on the agenda. It was not taken seriously and we were still grouped by the imagination that the African Renaissance that President Obesangio and Mbeki was championing at the time will be ushered in by the second green revolution in Africa. That was the discourse, that was the debate. Look at what's happened in the last decade and a bit. Report after report from the private sector, from the World Bank, from the UN Habitat, from just about every single policy actor that matters on the continent making the kinds of points that we heard this morning. This is significant. What this has meant now is a very different conversation to just a decade ago and I think it is important as Africans to take a moment to pause, to acknowledge that there's been a shift, that there's been a change and we're having a very different conversation today. And if I have to kind of summarize that conversation, if I have to make a bit of a caricature of it, that would be around these parameters. There's now a recognition that, of course, the big break on growth, the big break on fully realizing Africa's economic potential is the infrastructure deficit. You cannot have an energy supply system that is the same as that of Spain, servicing the whole continent and expect to be a significant global player. That's obvious, right? You cannot have the kind of logistical nightmares that we confront on the continent if you landlock country and expect to participate in the global economy. Obvious. But this growth imperative is also now triangulated very tightly, particularly through the work of UNECA, with imperative of job creation. In other words, this discourse around inclusive growth or job intensive growth. How bit of a mystery still, and we see lots of different reports, and particularly the recent report by the AU and the OECD on inequality and economic development that came out this year, with some interesting ideas. But we are still at ground zero in really cracking this question. And the reason is it's not because we closed for business. The reason is that the global trading system structurally marginalizes African economies. So if you don't address the global politically economy problem, how are you going to open for business? Right? How? So we can't disconnect these questions. But the discussion we're trying to have now is this tantalizing idea of structural transformation. It's tantalizing because the notion of structural transformation means deep rooted, systemic. That's important. It's critical for all the reasons that Alcindor outlined. But the transformation bit remains a little bit elusive because when this translates into the deals that Parks spoke about, the infrastructure deals that Ricky referenced, it is an imagination that I can broadly typify as three things. There's a sort of high-end idea that Ricky showed that is currently in currency in London and in others. These high-end real estate propositions of enclave-gated communities for the elites. Then there's this more progressive, grounded idea of middle-class social housing that will be mixed use and have all these wonderful elements of good urbanism. And then there's the activists, if you will, the social movement activists who are arguing that through carefully designed informal settlement upgrading, we can construct much more efficient, productive, makeshift settlements. And this is sort of a very interesting rendering that is a hybridization of these different imaginations. So this takes the floating school, the infamous noun, and the architects' proposition for Makoko. And it blends it with these other imaginations. And in some ways, this really crude, photoshopped idea of what the future could look like is where we're at. We actually don't have a substantive imagination of what could be a grounded alternative. So pastiche is what we are currently sort of, if you will, settle with. Now, there is a repost, right? And often in these conferences and debates, the repost isn't foregrounded. And so I want to just lift our two or three lines of critique that I think is important for us to at least keep in the back of our minds as we go through what will be lots of policy prescriptions over the next two days. So the first line of critique that is available in the literature and so forth is that when we look at all of these propositions that are so eloquently detailed in the latest World Bank report that we've just heard about, that essentially this sort of almost near obsession with sorting out these messy land markets is really just an alibi to, if you will, resolve the land market complexity so that you've got a smooth landing pad for capital. But this is not the issues, not capital. It's not FDI. The problem is it's the wrong kind of capital. As Raul would say who is in the room, it's impatient capital. Capital that wants spectacular returns with spectacular investments, right? Another line of critique is that if we are so obsessed with this question of a real estate driven model of urban development, what we are actually doing is we are consolidating a very powerful and narrow elite structure in our societies. And I think it's an important critique to pay attention to because we know for in the post-colonial period we've had this profound overlap of economic and political elites. And they've calcified into very narrow, very tightly organized elite systems in our societies. And finally, there was this amazing conference last year called Fearless Cities in Barcelona, where a group of, for lack of a better word, municipal socialists from around the world, experiments in radical alternatives, insisted that we have to pay a lot more attention to what municipal democratization might mean. What is deep citizenship? How do we think of urban incorporation that is not premised on technocratic obsessions with land markets, infrastructure finance, and smart cities, right? So I just leave that there without developing it, and I wanna conclude in the last two minutes with, I guess, a response to the provocations we've heard this morning. Can we think a different frame? Can we think an alternative? And taking my cue from what I guess for me has always been the most beautiful and sort of elegant core proposition of the urban age experiment, that good cities are cities that are marked by diversity and complexity. Taking that outcome as the starting point, for me, it seems that there are four critical questions we've got to always address simultaneously at all scales if we are gonna generate the innovations that resonate in our context. The question of meaningful work, and we've heard the reasons and the data. The fundamental structuring importance of prioritizing ecological regeneration. Part of the violence of the colonial and the post-colonial experiment has not just been dehumanization, but it has been the rape of our natural resources. And we've got to think those two things absolutely in tandem. The land question, the land market question, is not just a question of trade and exchange. It is about spatial justice. Can that be in the frame? And finally, drawing the most abundant resource from our society's cultural fulfillment or cultural expression. So four quick takeaways. Let's prioritize societal democracy in a deep way and let's pay attention to the large, mass-based institutions, churches, religious associations, saving clubs and so forth. Let's really take stock of all of this innovation that is widely distributed in our societies. That is, can do, as we've heard. But let's build a living archive of what those things are, because it's only by that recognition and that legibility that we can confront the question of productivity. Thirdly, we have to crack this question of money and with all due respect, Pox. For me, it is not about the deal-making that will get the players in the room that will fund more of the same. We've got to recognize that our cities and their needs are outside of the parameters of the mainstream infrastructure finance frameworks. And finally, let's build the research and development infrastructure and technology and innovation systems at the grassroots level in our cities. And of course, they have to be articulated so that we can really take this business of building an African frame, an African paradigm, an African vision about this different way of doing urbanism across the continent. Thank you.


In this video, I want to demonstrate how you can use the technique of elimination to help you solve systems of nonlinear equations. And in this video, we're going to use conic sections as our nonlinear equations.  These are two nonlinear equations. If we look at their graphs, we actually end up with the graphs of some parabolas. So the first one is this parabola for which it's going to be concave downward. The other one also is going to be a parabola that concave downward. We don't necessarily need to know that in order to solve it, but it can be helpful to have these pictures in front of you, right? When it comes to the intersection between two parabolas, you can have anywhere from zero, one, two, three, or four possible intersections. This picture seems to suggest two intersections, but again, we'll be able to determine this completely algebraically. Did you notice if you look at the y's, we have a 2y, we have a 7y. If I adjusted the coefficients, I could cancel those out by elimination, but even better, look at that. We have x-squares in both the first and second equation. If I could cancel out the x-squares by adjusting the coefficients, that would be phenomenal because after all, the x-squares can be much more complicated than the y-squares. So that's actually the direction I want to go in. Let's eliminate the x-squares. So I could do that by adjusting coefficients. If I multiply the first equation by 5, you're going to get 15x squared plus 10y equals 26 times 5, which would be 130. And then we're going to take the second equation and we're going to multiply it by a negative 3. So we get a negative 15x squared, excuse me. We're times everything by negative 3, right? So I'll actually write this on the screen. So we take negative 3 times that one, and then we were doing positive 5 times the first one, like so.  We're then going to add together these equations combining like terms. Now you'll notice, and this is the reason why we adjusted the coefficients the way we did, is that the 15x-squares are going to cancel out. The reason I chose 5 and negative 3 is I was trying to construct a common multiple of coefficients for x-square, and then make sure their coefficients were opposite and signed but equal in value there. So then combining the rest, we're going to end up with 10y minus 21y, which gives us a negative 11y. And then we take 130 minus 9, that's going to give you 121, for which if we divide both sides by negative 11, like so, you end up with y equals negative 11, 121 is 11 squared, right? So we end up with 11, excuse me, y equals negative 11. Now you'll notice here that we only got one y-coordinate, and when you look at the graph here, that kind of makes sense because the two points of intersection actually live on the same horizontal line. This is going to be the line y equals negative 11, right? Both of these functions are actually symmetric with respect to the y-axis, and so the two intersections are going to be reflective across the y-axis right there. So we only got one y-coordinate. That doesn't mean there's only one intersection, just means the two intersections actually have the same y-coordinate. So how do we figure out what the x-coordinates are? Well, we're going to take this y-coordinate and plug it into one of the two equations. It really doesn't matter which one you do for the sake of conversation, I'm just going to pick the first one here. So we're going to take 3x squared plus two times. Well, y, I know is negative 11, is equal to 26, right? This is a quadratic equation that we're going to try to solve. It only involves x squared, so I can actually solve it just by taking square roots here. So we're going to get 3x squared minus 22 equals 26. Let's add 22 to both sides. So we get 3x squared equals 48. Let's divide both sides by 3. We're going to end up with x squared equals 16. And then take the square root of both sides. We're going to end up with x equals plus or minus 4. And so we end up with 2x-coordinates, which is what our picture suggests right here. We have negative 4 and positive 4. So the two points of intersection are going to be 4, negative 11 and negative 4, negative 11. And so we're going to solve this system of equations using elimination. Let's do another example. In this example, what we're going to do is we're going to take the equation x squared plus y squared equals 13. So notice right here, this is going to be a circle. This is a circle centered at the origin and its radius is the square root of 13. All right, we can live with that, I suppose. The other one, x squared minus y equals 7, that's going to be a parabola. It might be a lot easier to see that if we solve for y, you get y equals x squared minus 7. So notice you could use substitution here. You could substitute this in for y and go from there, which would be perfectly fine to do such a thing. I somewhat hesitate to do that here because if you plug that in there, you're going to have to take a y squared, which requires that you actually have to get x to the fourth, right? So that's a degree 4 polynomial. If there's some way of avoiding that, I would like to do that. And that's why I actually think elimination might be a little bit friendly of a technique in this one. Because notice if we eliminated the x-squares, they'll be left with a y squared, a y and some constants, right? That's a quadratic equation. Given the choice between x to the fourth versus y squared, ding, ding, ding, quadratic is the way we want to go. But because x to the fourth is a possibility, I want you to realize that geometrically, if we start intersecting parabolas with circles, we can have up to four intersections like our picture seems to suggest right here. We could also get like two intersections and we have something like this, like the vertex of the parabolas inside the circle. You could have one intersection of the vertex is on the parabola. You could also get three intersections if you have the vertex on one side, but then it concaves into the circle. So you get something like that. You could also get no intersections because maybe the parabola is just not even touching the circle. So those are, geometrically, we anticipate anywhere from zero to four solutions. But let's find them algebraically. I'm going to do this by elimination. So if you just take the second equation and you times it by negative one, I think that'll actually do it for us here. Because that would then give us the first equation, x squared plus y squared equals 13. And then we're going to combine that with negative x squared plus y equals negative 7. If we add those two equations together, you'll see that the x squares cancel out, which is what we wanted. We really can't combine the y squared with the y.  So we end up with y squared plus y. That's okay. And on the right-hand side, we're going to take 13 minus 13 minus 7, which is going to give us 6. And so this is a quadratic equation. We can set the right-hand side equal to 0. y squared plus y minus 6 equals 0. So we look for factors of 6, negative 6, that add up to be 1. We can take y plus 3 and y minus 2, that equals 0. And so we end up with y being negative 3 and positive 2. So you'll notice that with our equations or with our y-coordinates right here, that does seem to work, right? There is like a horizontal line right here, y equals negative 3, that seems to match up. And there does also appear to be a horizontal line y equals 2 right there. Now we're going to get four solutions. And that's because as we plug in y equals negative 3 and y equals 2, we're going to get two possibilities here. Plug it into one of the two equations. It doesn't matter. I'm going to use this equation right here so I don't have to bother squaring the y-coordinates. It's by no means a big deal. You could use the other equation. But I'm going to use x squared minus y equals 7 here. So doing the first one here, negative 3, we're going to get x squared minus a negative 3 equals 7. And so therefore, x squared plus 3 equals 7. Subtract 3 from both sides. We get x squared equals 4. That is x equals plus or minus 2. This is going to give us two points of intersection. So we're going to have 2, negative 3. And we're going to get negative 2 comma negative 3 as points on the graph. Now we can see those points illustrated right here in our diagram. All right. For the next one, let's try y equals 2. So if x squared minus 2 equals 7, we can add 2 to both sides. We get x squared equals 9. Taking the square, we get x equals plus or minus 3. So again, there's going to be two more solutions here. There's going to be the point 3 comma 2. And there's also going to be the point negative 3 comma 2, which we can see on the graph right here. 3 comma 2 and negative 3 comma 2. So we found these points completely algebraically. But this technique of elimination is able to help us in this nonlinear system here. So a substitution would have worked in this example as well. But like I said, I think elimination works a little bit better because elimination leads to solving a quadratic equation as opposed to elimination. Elimination will lead to a quadratic equation while substitution leads to a quartic equation.  How do you decide what's the best option? Well, you kind of have to look at where is he going to take me? And I want to take the path of least resistance. Some people call that lazy. I call that being efficient. Efficiency is choosing the better path, the one that requires you to do less work.


Hello everybody Andrea here with dental L. So if you are able to have your own dental hygiene practice it does depend on your location. If you're not sure please check with your dental hygiene association if you are able to have one some areas can't. And some areas cannot I am personally in Ontario. So in Ontario we do need to become a self initiated dental hygienist. We can take a course for that several other things but then we can have our own dental hygiene practice. But what I want to talk to you guys in this video today is I want to talk to you guys about what if you're on the fence of. Well should I have my own dental hygiene practice or should I just continue working for a dental office so I'm going to give you some key points here that you really need to think about like both are good. And not so good but I'm going to give you guys different sides of the coin to really help you guys decide if having your own mobile dental hygiene business is best for you. So I'm going to talk about dental hygiene practices in general, but just so you know I am specific to a mobile dental hygiene practice so I see patients in their own home. I travel to them I bring in all of my equipment into their own home, but I also see patients in one room in my home so I do a little bit of both. I do not work in a full practice, I do not have a separate business like brick type location. Okay, so it's mobile and in my own home okay but what I'm going to talk to you guys about is going to be the same thing regardless it doesn't matter if you are thinking about having your own standalone business or not. So what I'm going to talk to you guys about what it's like having your own dental hygiene practice versus working for a dentist or working for somebody else so the first question. People always ask me is do you make enough money. Are you going to be in the red. Okay, so I've had my own dental hygiene practice since late 2018. Yes, you make much better money than if you worked for a dental office to look at it this way. When I worked at a dental office when I left. I was making $45 per hour. And I was working like Monday to Friday, some Saturdays actually as well from eight till six, hardly getting a lunch, seeing a lot of patients every day I was exhausted and making $45 per hour. That's pretty good money though right like $45 per hour is pretty good. Now in my own practice I set my own schedule. What my day looks like is I work typically 10am till two. I don't start earlier than 10am you guys I'm not a morning person but guess what I can do that 10am till about two. How many hours is that that's not a full day. 10am by two 30 typically again I travel right so some of that does involve travel time, but 10am till 2pm, and I can make anywhere depending on what type of patient I'm seeing, whether it's a new patient exam, a child adult or a new patient care if it's teeth whining. Let's just say on average I make about $200 a person. That's a lot better than $45 a person right $200 a person versus $45 a person well geez which one am I going to pick right. Again, it does depend on the types of patients I'm seeing. So, yes, you make better money, but another kind of side note to that as well as well you have to find your own patients. In the office they basically come to you because the business has been established it's been set up. So you do need to advertise you need to market you need to find your own patients. You will not be making money unless you find your own patients, patients aren't going to magically come to you, especially a mobile dental hygienist. Nobody's heard of it. It's very very rare, you might have one or two in your area, if that, in my area. I'm the only one. There's a mobile hygienist about two hours away, and then I know of a couple more like two hours away the other way closer to Toronto, but in my area. I'm the only one. That's a great thing because I have all of these patients but that also means I get a lot of the what is the mobile dental hygienist can you explain it to me before I book with you it sounds kind of weird you know you never know right. So, you have to find your own patients. If you don't you're not going to make that money. If you need help by the way I'm going to leave the link down below. I do have a course called mobile rdh Academy. The course has been in the working since 2019, where I teach you guys step by step how to have your own mobile dental hygiene business and or one in your own home. So it kind of works together. I go step by step I teach you like this so I talked to you guys in video, step by step where I talked to you guys about how to take it alone if you need one. I talk about business credit cards I talked about business bank accounts, but then I go into to talk about what a typical day is like what you're going to need to buy what you might want to save your money on what you should buy right away. So how much money you should expect to spend the first year. Don't worry you guys I talk about all of that. But then let's move on here. So a lot of dental hygienists that's another thing that they say to me as well. You know, am I going to have a lot of expenses when I work for a dentist when I work for for somebody else I don't have expenses. I work during the day, I come home I don't have to think about work I don't have there's no expenses if I need something the dentist typically buys it for me. I don't have expenses so is that a lot of money. Well, yes, you're going to have expenses of course you will with any business you're going to have expenses. But keep in mind more of your expenses are going to be the first year, because you're going to need to buy things that you don't have yet. The first year I had to buy a portable chair because I'm going portable to patients homes. I had to buy a stool for me to sit in I had to buy some end tables because sometimes patients don't have end table so there's actual portable tables that like fold over that I can put in my car. I wanted to buy some new instruments so I had to do that bibs masks polishing cups a polisher. Any type of materials. So there's more you have to buy the first year I bought a sterilizer. I bought a new laptop because I didn't have one and I kind of need to travel with that portably, but I needed to get a good one that was good enough for my dream software. So I could submit things electronically to patients insurance you get the idea right. So there's a lot of expenses the first year but if you have a good accountant. They can help you with all of that because business expenses are tax deductible. I mean you get like a tax credit for them.  So just as an example in 2021 I had $30,000 of expenses. I thought though you guys if you think about it, I do not work nine to five every day. If I did think about it working nine to five every day $200 a person. How much money are you going to make you're going to do amazing $30,000 and expenses is nothing and you get a tax credit for that you have to remember that. Again you guys do you want to work for a dental office where you don't have to worry about any of that.  If you're a mobile dental hygienist you have to keep track of transportation. I could go on here. So those are the main things though that you want to think about I talked about this more inside the mobile rdh Academy as well. Definitely check it out if you're thinking about having your own dental hygiene practice. And with all the points that I just mentioned, if you're thinking, I want to go for everything that Andrea just said.  I want to have my own business. This sounds incredible.  I'm going to have to take it alone the first year. What if I can't find patients what am I, you know, if those scare you maybe think about it a little bit more but also keep in mind, I can help you, I can be your support system inside my course the mobile rdh Academy I teach you guys all of this. How to be organized how to manage expenses. I even teach you guys how to get patients I teach you guys how I do it. I have at least 20 new patients a month at least I've checked at least 20 new patients a month. dental offices are lucky to have 10 new patients a month. And how many patients do dental offices have. I'm a dental hygiene practice if I can have 20 new patients a month I can absolutely help you have a successful business so this is where I come in I can help you. So inside the mobile rdh Academy I give everything to you. If you feel like you do need more help or more kind of one on one I do offer private business coaching as well, specific to dental hygienists starting their own practice. Either if you want your own dental hygiene practice, or a teeth winding practice as well kind of anything dental hygiene related, I can help you guys with. Okay. So let me know if any questions, please click like to this video if you haven't yet that does help me in my channel I really appreciate it. I'm going to give you guys up the link below to the mobile rdh Academy check it out and comment if you guys have any questions. Okay. Thank you guys very much I'll talk to you soon and happy Monday.


Income tax 2021-2022 education credits adjusted qualified education expenses. Get ready to get refunds to the max diving in the income tax 2021-2022. Most of this information can be found in the form 8863-2021 instructions on the IRS website IRS.gov IRS.gov income tax formula. We're down here in the credit area of the formula noting that both deductions and credits are good. But if you had a dollar deduction versus a dollar credit, the credit would typically be better because you get the full dollar worth of credit. Whereas the dollar deduction would be just a decrease to the tax or income and then the tax would be calculated upon it. The credits are typically broken out into two categories. Non-refundable credits, refundable credits, non-refundable credits, not typically taking the tax liability below zero. Whereas the refundable credits may and if did, then it wouldn't really be a refund you're getting at that point. Even though it might still be called a refund, it's more like a benefit program at that time. We also might have some credits that have a non-refundable and refundable component to them. This is the form 8863, the education credits form, American opportunity credit, lifetime learning credit. Remember that we kind of combine those squish them together here because we want to see if we have qualifying expenses. If we could first qualify for the American opportunity credits because it's typically better, giving us more benefit. And then if we can't get it, we go for the lifetime learning credit. That's the general thought process. Page two of the form 1040, we're flowing into this is the non-refundable section or component. It would flow into schedule three and then to line 20 on page two of the form 1040 amount from schedule three. And then this is the bottom of the form 1040 page two. This is the refundable section where we have line 29, the American opportunity credit from form 8863. So education credits adjusted qualified education expenses for each student reduce their qualified education expenses paid in 2021 by or on behalf of that student under the following rules. The result is the amount of the adjusted qualified education expenses for each student. So example number one, last year your child graduated from high school and enrolled in college for the fall semester. You and your child meet all the other requirements to claim the American opportunity credit and you need to determine adjusted qualified education expenses to figure the credit. Your child has $5,000 of qualified education expenses and $4,000 of room and board. Your child received a $5,000 Pell Grant and took out a $2,750 student loan to pay these expenses. You paid the remaining $1,250 the Pell Grant by its terms may be used for any of these expenses. So the Pell Grant you could use for any of the expenses that we're taking into consideration here. If you and your child chose to apply the Pell Grant to the qualified education expenses, it will qualify as tax-free scholarship under the rules discussed in chapter one of publication 970. So now you've got this Pell Grant, the Pell Grant then was used to pay for possible education expenses. And so you got kind of free money that you're not having to pay income taxes on because you got the money didn't have to record it as income. Then you're thinking the government is going to be thinking well then you shouldn't really be able to use that money that then you then paid for the education expenses because you'd be kind of like double dipping. You got free income to pay for the expenses and then if you were able to get the credit for it too that would be kind of like getting two benefits from the same thing. And so that's what they typically try to stop people from doing because that just makes sense. So your child won't include any part of the Pell Grant in gross income. So after reducing qualified education expenses by the tax-free scholarship, you will have zero. That's 5,000 minus 5,000 of adjusted qualified education expenses available to figure your credit. Your credit will be zero. So that seems fairly straightforward but it's a little bit more nuanced than we might think because notice how they kind of qualify this.  Now the grant that they're getting, they're saying you can apply then the grant to things like the room and board. That's kind of what the Pell Grant was provided for but the room and board for the purposes of the credit is going to be a personal expense. So not typically something that you can include. So even though you're basically saying I took the Pell Grant and applied part of it to the room and board, we're still saying that you're going to have to, for the credit purposes, you got to apply it basically to the credit. So you can see what happened here. Your child received a 5,000 grant and took out a 2,750 student loan to pay these expenses, which include the 4,000 of room and board, which for the credit purposes is kind of like a personal expense. You paid the remaining 1,250 so the Pell Grant by itself may be used for any of these expenses. So that's the key. The grant could be used for any of them but you can only, you can't use all of them for the calculation of the amount that you paid and so therefore you got to use the grant to reduce the 5,000. That's why you end up with the zero amount here because you're removing that kind of room and board component. So in essence, if you get the grant, then oftentimes that might result in you having to lower the amount that you would otherwise be including in the payments for the qualified expenses. Example two, the facts are the same as an example one. If unlike example one, you and your child chose to apply only $1,000 of the Pell Grant to the qualified education expenses and to apply the remaining 4,000 to room and board, only 1,000 will be qualifying as a tax-free scholarship. So your child will include the 4,000 applied to room and board in gross income and it will be treated as earned income for purposes of determining whether your child is required to file a tax return.  So after reducing qualified education expenses by the tax-free scholarship, you will have 4,000, 5,000 minus 100, two of adjusted qualified education expenses available to figure your credit. Your refundable American opportunity credit will be $1,000. Your non-refundable credit may be as much as $1,500, but depends on your tax liability. Now this might be a beneficial way to go if like you don't have a lot of income for example because you have that refundable portion of the credit. So the fact that you're going to have to record 4,000 of what would have been income that wouldn't be subject to tax as income isn't a big deal if your income is quite low and then you might be able to get access then to the refundable portion of the credit by being able to apply that amount to the credit. So if you're not otherwise required to file a tax return, you should file it to get the refund of your 1,000 refundable credit, but your tax liability and non-refundable credit will be zero. Note the result may be different if your child has other income or if you're the student. If you're the student and you claim the earned income credit, that's the other big refundable credit, choosing not to apply a Pell Grant to qualified education expenses may decrease your earned income credit at certain income levels by increasing your adjusted gross income. Now notice that that earned income is that earned income credit actually goes up to some degree as your earned income goes up and then it flattens off and it goes back down. So the fact that now you have this kind of situation where you have this money which you can either apply one way and it would basically be resulting in non-taxable income. And if you apply it another way that could result in it being included in income may have an impact on your earned income credit, which actually goes up as earned income goes up and then it flattens off and then it goes back down. So it's another kind of thing that you can test out and that's useful to have software to kind of look into that. Unlike a scholarship or fellowship grant, a tax-free distribution from a Coverdale ESA or Qualified Tuition Program, Section 529 plan can be applied to either qualified education expenses or certain other expenses such as room and board without creating a tax liability for the student. So if you put money into the Coverdale ESA then it's a little bit different than it's designed. That thing, that tool is designed to pay for these items including the room and board. So you don't have to then, if applying it to the room and board, do what we just talked about which would be included in income in that instance. An education credit can be claimed in the same year the beneficiary takes a tax-free distribution from a Coverdale ESA or Qualified Tuition Program as long as the same expenses aren't used for both benefits. For details there you can take a look at publication 970 chapter 7 and 8. You can find that on the IRS website. Tax-free educational assistance treated as a refund. Some tax-free educational assistance received after 2021 may be treated as a refund of qualified education expenses paid in 2021. This tax-free educational assistance is any tax-free educational assistance received by you or anyone else after 2021 for qualified education expenses paid on behalf of a student in 2021 or attributable to the enrollment at an eligible educational institution during 2021. If this tax-free educational assistance is received after 2021 but before you file your 2021 income tax return see refunds received after 2021 but before your income tax return is filed later. If this tax-free educational assistance is received after 2021 and after you file your 2021 income tax return see refunds received after 2021 after your income tax return is filed later. So you can see where this kind of problem comes into play. If you've got the refund that happens then the question is well did the refund take place in the same tax year and you knew about it which means you could take it into consideration in the same tax year or is it something that happened after you filed the return in which case that you might have different circumstances to take care of it or think about what to do with it in the following tax year. Refunds and refund of qualified education expenses may reduce qualified education expenses for the tax year or may require you to repay or recapture the credit that you claimed in an earlier year. So you can imagine what happens here similar with like the state tax refunds we talked about if you get a benefit in the current tax year and then in the next tax year you get a refund well now you got a benefit from the credit in the prior year and then you didn't really spend that money because you got a refund so what do you do at that point do you amend the prior tax year to fix the fact that you didn't really pay that money or more likely we would like to fix it in the current year when you got the refund. So some tax free educational assistance received after 2021 may be treated as a refund. See tax free educational assistance earlier refunds received in 2021. So we're talking about 2021 tax year and you got the refund in 2021. For each student figure the adjusted qualified education expenses for 2021 by adding all of the qualified education expenses paid in 2021 and subtracting any refunds of those expenses received from the eligible educational institution during 2021. So if you got a refund you might have to ask the institution say hey is this refund included in my documentation that you provided to me or not that you already do the decrease hopefully my form the 1098T is properly calculated by the institution but if not then you then you got to take that into consideration. Refunds received after 2021 but before the income tax return is filed. So now it's you haven't filed tax return 2021 you got the refund in 2022 but you have not yet filed. If anyone receives a refund after 2021 of qualified education expenses paid on behalf of a student in 2021 and the refund is received before you file your 2021 income tax return reduced the amount of qualified education expenses for 2021 by the amount of the refund. So you should still be able to take care of it in the tax year when you're filing for the credit 2021. That would be the easiest thing to do usually refunds received after 2021 and after the income tax return is filed. So now you got the refund in 2022 and you already got the benefit of the amount that was paid in 2021. If anyone receives a refund after 2021 of qualified education expenses paid on behalf of a student in 2021 and the refund is received after you file your 2021 income tax return you may need to repay some or all of the credit that you claim. You can see the credit recapture calculation. So here it is the credit recapture calculation paying it back. If any tax free educational assistance for qualified education expenses paid in 2021 or any refunds of your qualified education expenses paid in 2021 is received after you file your 2021 income tax return. You must recapture repay any excess credit. So you do this by refiguring the amount of your adjusted qualified education expenses for 2021 by reducing the expenses by the amount of the refund or tax free educational assistance. So basically you got to go back in and say OK what if my if I recalculate it on the proper amount after I take into consideration this refund then I'll figure what that is that what that amount is. You then figure your educational credits for 2021 and figure the amount by which your 2021 tax liability would have increased if you had claimed the refigured credit. So what would my tax liability be if I took this refund into consideration in tax year 2021 include that amount as an additional tax for the year refund or tax free assistance was received most likely in 2022. So we're not going to amend the prior tax return but we're going to go back to the prior tax return calculation calculating the credit under the 2021 rules. After having taken into consideration the refund as if we got the refund in 2021 and then try to fix it in 2022 by adding it to other taxes. Example you paid $8000 tuition and fees in December 2021 for your child's spring semester beginning January 2022. You filed your 2021 tax return on February 2nd 2022 and claimed a lifetime learning credit of $1600. That's 8000 qualified education expense paid times 20%. You claimed no other tax credit after you filed your return.  What was what's wrong with that kid? I paid and it's okay. It's okay.  You must figure your 2021 lifetime learning credit using 6600. So then if you got to refund now you got to refigure it because because they didn't finish this thing I paid for. Anyway, 8000 qualified education expenses minus the 1400 refunded the refigured credit is 1320 and your tax liability increased by $280. So you got to recalculate it. I'm at the 280 you must include your difference of 280 which is the 1600 credit originally claimed minus the 1320 refigured credit as additional tax on your 2022 income tax return. So see the instructions for your 2021 income tax return determine whether to include this tax tip. If you paid qualified education expenses in both 2021 and 2022 for an academic period that begins and the first three months of 2022 and you receive tax free educational assistance or a refund as described above. You may choose to reduce the qualified education expenses you paid in 2022 instead of reducing the qualified education expenses paid in 2021. If you're in that kind of cut off overlap area. Eligible educational institution. What is that? What are those things? What's a qualified institution? An eligible educational institution is generally any accredited public nonprofit or proprietary private college university. They vocational school or other post secondary institution. Also the institution must be eligible to participate in a student aid program administered by the Department of Education. Virtually all accredited post secondary educations meet this definition. An eligible educational institution also includes certain educational institutions located outside the United States that are eligible to participate in a student aid program administered by the Department of Education. Tip, an educational institution should be able to tell you if it is an eligible educational institution. So you might want to get a third party and not be completely reliant on the person that you're going to be paying the tuition to but the educational institution is usually well aware that they qualify as an educational institution and willing to inform you of that. So you know when you're thinking about signing up for the tuition or something like that so you should have an idea of that there. So additional information see publication 970 chapters 2 and 3 for more information about these credits.