If you know how college loan consolidation works, you can save thousands of dollars a year - money you could use to buy books and other materials to aid you through college. Read on to familiarize yourself with the concept of loan consolidation and learn how to make it work for you.
Consolidation works to simplify your collage loans and lower your monthly payment dues. If you have a $20,000 loan and pay around $209 a month at 4.5% in interest, for example, you will only need to pay about $130 after consolidation. That means you save about $80 a month, or almost a thousand dollars every school year! If you have a $40,000 dollar loan paid in the same interest rate, you would be paying almost $420 monthly without consolidation. You can actually slash that fee to almost half - around $230 - if you consolidate wisely. That will enable you to save more than $2,000 every year!
How does it work, exactly? Consolidation is simpler than you think. College loan lenders simply merge all of the federal student loans you presently have and then pay all of its outstanding balances in full. The lender then becomes your sole creditor. This simplifies all of your payment processes, because you only need to pay one lender and deal with one interest rate.
How do you choose a loan consolidation lender? More than the interest rates and terms, it's really the quality of a lender's student support that you should look at. The lender's customer representatives should be able to explain the consolidation process in a way that you understand - no financial jargon or confusing conditions. They should provide you with one-on-one counseling to ensure that your loans will be consolidated to positively affect your finances - not put more pressure on them.
Effective college-loan consolidation can greatly help alleviate the current monthly costs of your education, so that you can have more cash to spend on your day-to-day expenses. It can likewise help smooth out your finances in the long run, so that you never have to be burdened with unmanageable debt after you graduate.
