Loan Experts - Student loan consolidation

      Student loan consolidation - Overview

    Student Loan Consolidation allows you to combine several existing student or parent loans into one new loan from a single lender, using this new loan lender to pay off the balances on the other loans received from financial institutions or from the federal government.

      You must then repay to one single lender instead of making different repayments and amounts to various lenders. The student loans eligible for consolidation must be either in grace period (six months after finishing your studies) or repayment, and the minimum amount of money for consolidation is USD 5000.

     You should review all the advantages and disadvantages of consolidation student loans, comparing the cost of repayment of all the student loans with the cost of repaying a single Consolidate Student Loan, before choosing the consolidation student loan options.

- Student Loan Consolidation centralize your payments: you just pay to one single financial institution.

- You have an extended repayment period, between 10 and 30 years depending on the total amount borrowed.

- Your bank or other financial institution should offer you a phased repayment plan taking your income into account so that you can still face your monthly payments and have a good credit qualification as a borrower.

- You can reduce your monthly repayment amount, extending the repayment period.

- The resulting interest rate will usually be lower than that of one or more of the loans you’re consolidating.

- The interest rate for Consolidation Student Loans is fixed (for Federal Direct Loans and Federal Family Education Loans) during the repayment period and will never rise higher than 8.25 %.

- Because the interest rate is fixed, students (or their parents) can’t benefit from future interest rate falls.

- The interest charges of your loan may increase a lot during the loan’s life if you take a long time to repay it.

- There are no fees for consolidation.

- Consolidation loans can’t be undone once they are approved, because the loans consolidated have been repaid in full to the respective creditors and have ceased to exist. Now, you will have only the new loan.

     Loans with overdue or unfulfilled repayments may still be considered for consolidation if a satisfactory repayment plan has been agreed with the bank or other creditor.

    Married couples may also consolidate their student loan debts together if they agree to repay the consolidation loan regardless of how much each of them individually owed beforehand. If they change their marital status in the future, that will not change their debt situation.