Copyleft 2006. Steven Longoria
It's hard for the average college graduate to pay back all of their federal student loans. Of course, they were necessary to get a good education and the education you needed to get the job of your dreams.
Now that you have reached your goal, you are worried about how you will pay off all of your loans and meet your other financial obligations.
In recent months, more and more banks and credit unions have noticed that many students with a lot of student loan debt are having trouble meeting all of their financial obligations.
So that new graduates don't have to worry about their student loans, programmes have been made that let graduates or soon-to-be graduates consolidate their student loans at a low interest rate. Some of the rates go as low as 1.75 percent and go as high as about 5.5 percent, depending on the lender, the length of the loan, and the amount of the loan.
A student who consolidates their federal loans saves about $150 per month, which is 51% of their monthly payments. Depending on the size of the loan and the original payment plan, there may be even more money saved.
You can pay for a Federal student loan consolidation over ten or twenty years. A lot of these programmes do not check your credit or verify your income. These loans are meant to help the new graduate get started in the working world and in their chosen career without having to worry about how they will pay back the many loans they had to take out to get their degree.
Most of the time, these are students whose parents couldn't pay for college and who didn't get a full scholarship. So, they had no choice but to take out student loans to pay for their education. However, now that they are graduating or have graduated, they have to pay back the thousands of dollars they borrowed.
With the job market the way it is, many of these students won't be able to get a job that pays as much as they had hoped, if they can even find a job in their field of study.
By lowering the payments on these loans, the new graduate will be able to focus on more important things, like getting a job if he hasn't already and paying off his high-interest credit cards with the money he saves by consolidating his student loans.
The new graduate who already has a family will be able to spend more time with his or her family instead of working harder and longer hours. Also, if he and his family have been living with relatives, the money they save on their student loans might give them the chance to move out and be financially independent.
Federal student loan consolidation is a godsend for many students who would not have been able to go to college at all without loans.
