Friday, 6 January 2012

Reducing Monthly Payments By Getting A Student Loan Consolidation

By Harold Spencer


Congratulations, you have just finished college - so that means it's time to pay off your student loans. Federal student loans are cumulative, as they are applied for yearly, which means by the time you graduate you would likely have multiple student loans, each with their own interest rate. A student loan consolidation makes perfect sense in this case.

Applying for a student loan consolidation gives you a chance to lock in a lower and more agreeable rate of interest on your student loan. The former student will also benefit from lower payments each month. This is important for individuals who are just starting their careers.

On top of the obvious advantage of garnering a lower interest rate, a student loan consolidation would be perfect because it allows you to further build on your credit, as you would be wont to do at this point in your life. Once you sign on the dotted line and formalize the student loan consolidation, regardless of the rate, your credit report will duly indicate that all your outstanding student loans have been paid off.

When your credit report shows that you have fewer outstanding loans (multiple student loans are replaced by one loan), the number of your credit score will go up. For future loans, a good credit score is vital to getting a better interest rate. This is yet another reason why a student loan consolidation is a great idea.

Simplified Steps to Applying for a Consolidation Loan

The first step in applying for a student loan consolidation is to fill out and submit the required application form. The application can be filled out either online or in a paper format. In order for the loan to be consolidated (assuming your application has been approved), the lender would require you to submit statements of payoff from your existing loans.

You would still want to continue paying off your outstanding student loans and making your monthly payments during the processing stage, because the consolidation lender would normally not receive the payoff statements for quite some time.

The lender would then work on approving an interest rate and the student loan consolidation itself, which would give you a new federal loan in your name.

Consequently, all outstanding student loans will be paid off in full. You can now focus on one loan and making only one monthly payment post-consolidation. Your final payment would also be lower, which should free up your monthly budget for utility bills, family expenses, etc.

Borrowers, as an aside, have the option as well to have the payments drafted from their checking account automatically, which means that on the student loan consolidation, they may have a good chance of qualifying for an even lower interest rate.




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