How To Consolidate Your Student Loans

Manifest What you Want, Whenever you Want....

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 not necessarily a good idea for everyone; of course, the benefit of consolidating your loans is that you will only need to make one payment a month, to one place (typically the US Department of Education), but you should also realize 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 will also want to make sure you remember that only federal loans qualify for consolidation; because of this, the option of consolidating any private student loans you have taken out will not be available to you, and you 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 that your student loans qualify for loan consolidation, and make sure it will be a good idea for you - and if both of these are the case, you will be able to take the simple steps to consolidating your loans into a single bundle, under a single holder.