Tips For Consolidating Your Student Loans

The Relationship Cure: A 5 Step Guide to Strengthening Your Marriage, Family, and Friendships

If you have student loans, one thing you will hear from a lot of people is the suggestion that you should consolidate these loans - but while this is sometimes true, you will want to make sure of a few things yourself before you take this step: you will want to make sure consolidating your loans will be a good idea, you will want to make sure you qualify, and you will need to know how to do it.

Consolidating student loans is great at times, but this is not necessarily the case every time; of course, the primary benefit you will receive from consolidating your loans will be that you will only need to make one payment a month, to one place (typically the US Department of Education), but another thing to be aware of is that this will take away the opportunity for you to apply for any deferments or forbearances, and it will likely cause you to take longer to pay off your loans (which means paying more money) - so if you feel good about your loans as they stand and are not having any problems, you should leave them alone.

You should also realize that only federal loans qualify for consolidation; this means that you will not have the option of consolidating any private student loans you have taken out, and will need to continue paying these off separately.

And finally, realize that the things you need to do in order to consolidate your loans are fairly simple (really, you need to do nothing more than fill out an application on the US Department of Education website), but until confirmation reaches you that says your loans have, in fact, been consolidated, you will still have to continue making payments on the loans you already have out there!

Make sure the student loans you are carrying qualify for loan consolidation, and make sure loan consolidation will be a good idea for you - and if both of these happen to be the case, you will be able to take the simple steps to consolidating your loans into a single bundle, under a single holder.