Student Loans questions

Barcardi

Ok so i have never had a large student loan before now. But now i have a 50k+ amount racked up, and when paid back over 10 years at 6.8% they wanna charge me around 80k total. That is both from sub and unsub loans.

First off where can i go, what references exist to help guide me through this process?.. how can i keep the loan people honest, does that math seem right? Hopefully, ones that are not trying to sell me something with a variable rate... cuz i know how that evilness works.

Second, my parents immediately brought up the idea of making a few payments, for about a year, and then paying it off in full with money from my grandmother. Then i would pay my grandma the interest. That sounds awesome to me. However will doing such a thing cause any damage to my credit score in the short/long term? I don't normally check my credit score because i find that sort of thing and its abstract bs math to be genuinely disheartening, although i have never missed a bill payment for anything my entire life.

Third, and this is just a follow up to my 2nd question, what is the best way to pay off a student loan while not fucking your credit score up? Fast or slow?

ceres

Your credit score cares only that you pay it, AFAIK. I'm not an expert though. I had my student loans consolidated at a not-terrible interest rate, and I think the key to dealing with any loan is to pay extra into it when you can without overextending yourself (in other words, don't put yourself in debt or skip other bills to make more than your minimum payment). Doing so, even just $20 a month to your principle, can really reduce not only the time it takes you to repay it, but how also how much you spend on interest in the long run.

Crashtard

Paying it off certainly won't hurt your credit score, but is it worth borrowing money from family to do it? I'm not going to go into that much, just to say that borrowing money from family is iffy at best. Be careful.

As far as your actual student loan debt, 6.8% seems a little high for an interest rate. Have you already consolidated your loans? If not, you need to do that soon. Like right now. While you're reading this. I got my consolidation through ACS (acs-education.com) at a rate of 5.25% fixed. That rate also decreases by something like .5% after I make so many on-time payments (something like 2 years). The other nice thing about consolidating is that you're only dealing with one place instead of multiple, and will reduce your monthly payments a little as well since you're paying less interest.

ceres wrote: »

Your credit score cares only that you pay it, AFAIK. I'm not an expert though. I had my student loans consolidated at a not-terrible interest rate, and I think the key to dealing with any loan is to pay extra into it when you can without overextending yourself (in other words, don't put yourself in debt or skip other bills to make more than your minimum payment). Doing so, even just $20 a month to your principle, can really reduce not only the time it takes you to repay it, but how also how much you spend on interest in the long run.

This is the other thing I wanted to hit on. I'm finally getting into a position where I'm going to be able to make about 33% extra per monthly on my student loans. I don't remember the exact numbers, but it's going to cut down my repayment time by a few years, as well as save me a decent amount of money in interest.

Barcardi

along those lines then, how do i go about consolidating all these student loans?

AlyceInWonderland

I'd LOVE to know this as well, as I was just talking to my dad about this like..20 minutes ago (thanks for saving me from making me a thread)

ceres

Well, I did something that was probably very stupid but worked out for me in the end: I knew the time was coming, so I followed an internet pop-up (this was years ago and I know better now than to trust anything on the internet) and ended up consolidating with the company I was lead to. Like I said, it's worked out well enough for me. My interest rate, which is fixed, was a lot better at the time than it is now, but when I have enough on-time payments it'll go down 1%, making it good again.

You can probably get some kind of deal like that, but you'll have to shop around.

Spherick

https://loanconsolidation.ed.gov/AppEntry/apply-online/appindex.jsp

Crashtard

Here is a good place to start. The government has some helpful information about what you'll need, as well as what you can and cannot consolidate together. Most places will not consolidate private and government loans (at least from what I've seen), so you'll probably have to do the government ones together and any private ones together (depending on what you have of course).

Apparently ACS, who I'm with currently, now services loans for the following private lenders:

Access Loans, Brazos MedFund, Platinum & A+ Funds Loans, JP Morgan Chase, Chela Cal Edge, CLC Premier Loans, Coopers & Lybrand, EFG Platinum & Select Loans, Education Finance Partners, Davidson College, Goal Financial, GCO Private Loans, Global Loan Program, Key Bank Private Loans, MEFA Loans, MEGA Loans, Med One/Op One, PNC Resource Loans, Stanford Loans, Student Maximizer, Grove City Loans, TERI Loans, Penn Guaranteed Loans, Univ. of the Pacific Loans, FUEL Loans, JP Morgan Chase Private Loans, and PREP Loans.

You can find contact info (again for ACS) here.

One thing I would encourage you to do is poke around the education services website and learn about a. what you're getting into, and b. what loans can and cannot be consolidated together. Try to talk to a few different consolidation places to get an idea of what the going rates are, and then make your decision on that. You'll also want to look at the different sites and see how user-friendly they are. ACS has a great website. It's easy to use, you can make online payments in about 60 seconds and it displays your current repayment information as soon as you log in. I'd definitely recommend them.

Edit: Another nice thing about ACS is that they give you a 10 (I think) day grace period on your due date. You can pay it a couple days late if you need to, and it doesn't get reported as late, or affect your interest rate or any of that business.

Slider

I consolidated my loans. They are with Sallie Mae and Nelnet now and currently in deferrment. I wouldn't recommend Sallie Mae, but Nelnet has been easy to work with.