Can you please help out a beginner. Any advice appreciated!

[Leherself]

The trouble with financial aid is that by and large it doesn't help much with alternative methods of education. If you qualify for a pell grant, then you can sometimes get some of it disbursed as cash - but that usually requires that you be a full time student enrolled in a traditional University of some fashion (either online or in person). As far as I know there isn't a way for CLEP or DSST to be paid for directly by financial aid. And tuition at the big three is so expensive that you're probably going to want to minimize the number of courses taken there even if you do have assistance.

If you want to get started for cheap then I'd recommend Saylor - $25 per exam is hard to beat. Alternatively, you could look into the study.com coupon - a yearlong membership for about $1000. That gives you the opportunity to take 6 credits a month for 12 months, which means that if you pass that many classes then you can get up to 72 credits for what amounts to less than $15 a credit hour.

There's a rumor going around that TESU is still giving 6 credits apiece for CLEP literature exams (Analyzing and Interpreting Literature, English Literature, and American Literature). Those plus CLEP College Composition, and TECEP or DSST Technical Writing, are pretty much all of the exams I can think of off the top of my head that would apply to an English focus.

As for majors - the TESU humanities major might be a good option. You need 30 credits in three different humanities topics (English, Literature, Philosophy, Religion, Communications, Art, etc.), including 15 credits of upper division. Straighterline offers three courses that would apply as upper division to a Humanities major - Business Ethics (PHI-386), Business Communication (COM-300), and Intro to Religion (REL-405).

While it's your life and you can do whatever you want, I honestly don't see much point to the GED. Once you've got a degree (even an Associate's) the importance of a high school diploma basically disappears. And I'm not sure that a GED would be seen as any better than an IED diploma - I have a GED myself and the usual reaction I got when I used it (very infrequently and a long time ago) was "so... why didn't you graduate high school?"

TESU's Associate of Arts doesn't require a capstone. That'd be a good intermediate goal to shoot for on your way to a Bachelor's degree, rather than a GED, and all of the credits would apply to your Bachelors (if you picked a liberal arts degree) so you wouldn't be going out of your way.