Student Loan Consolidation Can Never Hurt You

You will hear me harp over and over about consolidating your student loans.  There are several reasons why you need to do it.  For one, it will lock you into a fixed rate for the life of the loan.  Second, you only have to pay one payment per month, rather than several different ones.  Lastly, it just makes sense, because there are no hidden fees or catches associated with it. 

One sight that some of my friends have used is Student Loan Consolidator that helps walk you through the loan consolidation process.  They seem to have a good customer service department to explain the process.  I went directly through Direct Loan Services and it was a fairly easy process.  All you need to do is find out all of your student loan numbers and the amounts that you owe.  Then, you’ll be able to consolidate them all to one lump-sum loan.  There is typically no loan consolidator that is significantly “better” than the other.  But each one has their own incentives for lowering your interest rate.  Be sure to pay on time for at least a year and then you can ask for an interest rate decrease.  Also, they will usually lower your rate if your sign up for EFT, but I do NOT recommend this, because you never want to give your creditors access to your bank account.  You need to eat and have electricity before you pay creditors. 

The reason that I am sold on student college loan consolidation is that when I did it, I locked in a 2.75% rate.  I know that the rates are much higher now, but that does not mean that you should not lock in a rate now.  Usually rates do not jump back down significantly, so I would try to salvage what you can now just in case the interest rate keeps rising.  You can listen to my soap box someday about how I think it is criminal to penalize college graduates with higher interest rates when the government is just bad at handling money.  That’s another battle for another day.  Anyway,  I hope this helps. 

 

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