If you’ve graduated and have more than one private student loan, you might be asking How Can I Consolidate Private Student Loans? This article will give you information on private student loans and answer the question How Can I Consolidate Private Student Loans?
Private Student Loan Consolidation
Private student loan consolidation can make your life easier by giving you one payment a month to make and decreasing those payments.
Most of the time you can’t consolidate private loans with federal loans. Private loans don’t have interest rates as low as federal loans do. That doesn’t mean that you can’t get your interest rates and monthly payments lower to fit your budget.
Private consolidation loans replace one or many loans with another. This means that point of this consolidation is getting one payment a month instead of many. Because the consolidation starts the terms of the loan over, you can get a lower monthly payment than what you have currently.
The interest rates on these loans are determined by your credit rating. If you have a good enough score you can get your interest rates lowered, either by going with another lender or working with your current lender.
Home Equity Loans
You can compare the interest rates of home equity loans to a private education loan. They are usually about the same. You might want to try and get your variable interest rate fixed, you can consider taking out a fixed rate home equity loan and use that to pay your private education loan.
Lenders
Lenders are not always private consolidation programs. In this case, interest rates will be made by the lender, instead of the government. Sometimes you might have to pay extra fees to create these loans.
It isn’t a good idea to consolidate federal with private loans. You should do these separately. Federal consolidation loans can give you many betters than private consolidation loans can.
When you are deciding on a private consolidation loan, make sure that the rate is fixed, if there are any fees associated with the loan and if the loan has any prepayment penalties.
Some Of The Advantages Of Student Loan Consolidation
Consolidating a student loan means taking out a loan to cover many other debts. This is possible even when such financing is done by different lenders. A student is normally given a six-month grace period after higher education completion. During this period, no payments towards the education debt are expected. It is during the grace period that the student is expected to decide on consolidation.
Student loan consolidation has several advantages as compared to other repayment options available to the debtor. Among the advantages available is the fact that you can get a lender who will not charge any fees. This means of repayment is also an advantage to the borrower since they are in a better position to improve their credit. The lender will normally give an account to the credit bureaus on how payments are being made. This is attributed to the fact that one pays a smaller amount.
Student financing consolidation has an advantage over other forms of repayment since there are no prepayment penalties. This means that the individual can make a prepayment without worries of being charged over it. This in turn helps the debtor to save a reasonable amount at the end of the whole process.
The most obvious of the advantages of student financing consolidation is that the debtor will only be accountable to only one creditor at the end of the month. This saves the students money in terms of the interest charged on each of these debts. The student under this repayment program will also be eligible for deferment. This means that the debtor can temporarily be exempted from making payments due to some stated reasons.
Can I Consolidate My Student Loans More Than Once?
Many people ask themselves, Can I consolidate my student loans more than once? If you have already obtained a consolidated student loan, you may notice a need for another consolidation. If you have not received a consolidated loan, knowing the reasons for a re-consolidation will be helpful when choosing a company for your original consolidation loan.
Your education loan consolidation company may have rules and restrictions in your original loan contract that will not allow re-consolidation, so if you know that you may need one in the future you might want to make sure that your original consolidation company allows re-consolidations.
Consolidating Student Loans:
When you have multiple loans outstanding, consolidating can help in so many ways. You can lump all of your loan payments into one payment. The most important reason to consolidate your loans is that you can save on the interest rate. Instead of paying interest on several loans, you will only have to pay interest on one loan.
Can I Consolidate My Student Loan Twice?
The simple answer is yes. If you have already consolidated your multiple education loans, you are already paying lower interest. Should you accumulate more loans after your first consolidation, you may consolidate again. You may also want to re-consolidate after you get married and your spouse also has multiple student loans in need of consolidation. You can combine your consolidation with your spouse’s student loans to create one consolidated loan.
Where Can I Re-consolidate?
In most cases, you can re-consolidate with the original consolidation company. An important thing to remember is that when you re-consolidate you may not get the same interest rate it will probably be higher as you are adding more weighted interest.
In this crazy world where bills arrive almost daily, consolidating loans is the best way to lower the stress of those daily wallet drainers. You can stop asking yourself, Can I consolidate my student loans more than once? Under the right circumstances, anyone can consolidate their student loans more than once. Marriage and more schooling are the only reasons that could allow you to re-consolidate, but they are very good reasons which are why re-consolidations are there.
Student Loans Online Student Loan Consolidation
Over the years, student loan consolidation has taken the advantage of the internet and started to offer its service online. Although filing your loan consolidation online can seem convenient, it is your responsibility to understand the pros and cons of online student loan consolidation.
The pros
The first advantage when you are consolidating your student loans online is that you can do it at your convenience. With that being said, you can file your application whenever and wherever you are. You can even do it when you are in the office. Of course, you shouldn’t do that. It was merely an example to show you the convenience of doing this online.
During the older days, the client and the agent have to meet up face to face for loan consolidation and that takes a lot of time and effort. But with the help of the internet nowadays, you can most of the things done over the internet. You can fill in the application and attach the documents online, discuss further progress through email and you can even pop a question through the messenger. This can save a lot of time and traveling hassle.
And to make your life easier, many loan consolidators are moving toward online payment and you can earn some incentives when you join this service. This is certainly a win-win situation where the consolidators will get their payment on time by charging your credit card and you can save some money in the process.
The cons
As you might have guessed, all good things always come with flaws and this goes the same for online student loan consolidation. There are a lot of scammers online trying to take your money even though you don’t have much money as a student or fresh graduate. Their logic might be that fresh graduates are easy prey and it is easier to get money from you all.
So, when you got an offer that seems to be lower than the market rate, don’t be too happy about that. You have to be cautious about the offer and check the legitimacy of the website with the Better Business Bureau.
Besides that, some online loan consolidators might ask for advance payment as an excuse for a processing fee and this fee might not be significant. Please don’t believe in that because the application for student loan consolidation should be free.
And to be sure that you know this, you should never review your credit card and social security number with any online loan consolidators before you agree on their service. They might claim that these details are to use for your credit check. Again, these are just excuses scammers made up to steal your identity. Legitimate loan consolidators will only ask for these details when you have decided to adopt their service.
How Do I Consolidate My Child’s Student Loan?
If your child has a bundle of different loans from college, you may think, I’d like to consolidate my child’s student loan.
This can be a good idea if you do it properly and at the right time.
Do You Qualify?
The first information to gather when you wonder, How will I consolidate my child’s student loan? is information that tells you if you qualify for loan consolidation.
The student must be out of school (enrolled half time or less) to qualify for consolidation. You need to be in the grace period of the loans (the months between leaving school and when you must start making loan payments) or you must be actively paying on the loan and be current on your payments.
If these circumstances do apply to you, then you can consider consolidation.
Federal Loan Consolidation
The next consideration is the types of loans your child has. If you have federal student loans, then all of them can be consolidated into one loan.
When you’re trying to consolidate your child’s student loans, you can consolidate them into one single loan if all of the loans are FEELP loans. These include Stafford — an extremely common type of loan – PLUS, SLS, FISL, Perkins, Health Professional Student Loans, NSL, HEAL, Direct Loans, and Guaranteed Student Loans. All of these are different types of federally guaranteed loans.
The government has a division that handles the consolidation of Federal loans, and they set the interest rate for the consolidated loans.
When you consolidate the loans guaranteed by the Federal government, they figure the interest rate by creating a weighted average of all the interest rates, then rounding up 1/8 of a percent. This rate is capped at 8.25 percent.
The rates on most Federal loans are reasonable, particularly when compared to the going rate for borrowing, so the interest rate on a consolidated loan is generally reasonably low.
The application for a Federal consolidation loan is online. While you can download it and mail the application in, this process takes much longer to complete than the online application with an electronic signature.
Private Student Loans
If you have private student loans, you may still want to consolidate, but don’t try to do so with your child’s federal loans. A loan consolidation with private student loans is similar to consolidating credit card debt or any other type of personal debt.
There are no special interest rates for private student loans, so you pay the going rate.
Shed Education Loans burden through Student Loan Consolidation
As a student, you took many loans for meeting the ever-increasing expenditure on college education. But now you think the loans should be made easier so that the debt burden could be reduced. Student loan consolidation is exactly meant for this purpose of managing the burden of Federal Student loan debt.
On taking student loan consolidation a student can all of his or her outstanding education loans into a single loan. So even if you took loans from many sources or your loans are of different types, student loan consolidation merges all your outstanding loans into it. The main advantages and motive behind student loan consolidation are that the student wants to merge all debts into a lower interest rate new loan so that he saves a huge amount of money that was to go waste for paying higher interest on debts.
Another motive is getting a larger repayment duration. Student loan consolidation can be availed for a repayment duration ranging from 12 years to 30 years depending on the total amount of student loans. So, for instance, a student can repay his $ 60000 outstanding balance in 30 years through student loan consolidation. There are many repayment plans in place for the convenience of the student, like a graduate repayment plan, income-sensitive repayment plan, extended repayment, etc.
The rate of interest on student loan consolidation is fixed and is calculated based on a statuary formula created by the Federal Government. So the weighted average of your current interest rates on Federal Student loans is taken into account for finalizing a lower rate of interest on student loan consolidation.
A student can source student loan consolidation online from various lenders. There are student loan consolidation programs offered online by several lenders that offer the loans as per governmental rules. Search for them and apply online. And do not worry about your bad credit as for them these loans are approved without any hurdles.
Summary
Student loan consolidation is meant for reducing the burden of all education loans. The rate of interest is kept lower on the student loan consolidation and a larger repayment duration can be availed for reducing the monthly payment towards the loan installments. Read the article for the details.
Six Things To Consider With Student Loan Consolidation Interest Rates
If you have recently received your degree, you might wonder how to get the student loan consolidation interest rates. Student loan payments may be due the very month you graduate so this article will show you how to get the student loan consolidation interest rates.
1 Why You’re Consolidating
If the reason you’re consolidating is to pay your loan off early, then you’ll want to get a principal reduction. However, if you want 20 or more years, to completely pay off the loan, you want to ask for a reduction in your interest rate.
2 Get A Good Rate Reduction
To get the best principal or rate reduction you might want to start with nonprofit lenders. Their operation costs are lower so they can give better savings. Student Lending Works is probably one of the best places to get low rates.
3 Pay Attention to the Terms
One thing you need to be especially careful about is checking to make sure that all your changes are permanent and fixed. Variable interest rates can shoot up at any time, or lenders will assign fees without notification.
4 Bonuses
Often lenders will offer discounts for certain things, such as having automatic payments taken out of your checking account. Make sure that you research these discounts thoroughly before you talk to the lender.
5 Be Careful of Shady Lenders
Lenders will sometimes advertise special discounts or other perks as something extra when you were already supposed to receive these things. For example, a lender may say they can give you a discount if you consolidate during a certain period, making it sound as though this isn’t something you would receive otherwise. However, this is something that lenders have to give you legally.
Some of the things you are entitled to are fixed interest rates, no fees, no credit checks, no repayment penalties, and rates that are 0.6 percent if you consolidate during your grace period.
If you have a lender offer any of those things as extras, you should probably move on as they are probably not the most honest lender to work with. These lenders use these tactics to mask the fact that they can’t give any of their benefits
6 Look For The Discounts
Making your payments on time can allow you to get discounts. But if you make a late payment even once until the principal is paid off, you will lose the discount. Some of your bigger loans could take as much as 30 years to pay off, so attaining that goal seem pretty improbable. These are lenders to avoid as well. Make sure that any extras you get will stay the same no matter what happens.