This post is devoted to you (yes, you!) to make sure that you start off your life as a degree holder right, with as little financial confusion or anxiety as possible. To get started, I recommend you take a second to read my blog post on exit counseling.
Once you have chosen your repayment plan, it is time to consider your current financial picture. Do you have a full-time job lined up already? If not, are you working part-time?
More than likely, you will have some sort of job when you graduate… so the question becomes one of how much can you afford in living expenses per month. Depending on the amount (and type) of loans you took out for school and the repayment plan you selected, the monthly payments may still be out of your reach by the end of your grace period.
Do I have any alternatives if I can’t afford my payments? Absolutely. A student loan consolidation can significantly reduce your monthly payments at the expense of lengthening the repayment term for your loans. For federal loans, if you selected the “extended repayment plan”, this won’t really apply to you. Where consolidation really shines is private student loans.
Depending on your credit (or with the help of a creditworthy co-signer), a private student loan consolidation can net you an excellent variable interest rate with a longer repayment plan. The result: lower monthly payments, but more interest paid overall.
Although this trade-off might leave you wondering which is the lesser of the two evils, I say with certainty (being extremely familiar with the process and how personal finance works) that it is in your best interest to be able to make your monthly payments consistently every month instead of letting any of your loans go delinquent or even drop into default. The latter will do nothing but destroy your credit and leave you in a tough situation for years.
My life is worth living comfortably for me and my family now and really have never seen goodness shown to me this much in my life as I have been going through a problem as seriously as my son found a terrible accident last two weeks, and the doctors states that he needs to undergo a delicate surgery for him to be able to walk again and I could not pay the bills, then your surgery went to the bank to borrow and reject me saying that I have no credit score, from there i run to my father and he was not able to help, then when I was browsing through yahoo answers and i came across a loan lender Mr, Pedro, offering loans at affordable interest rate I had no choice but to give it an attempt and surprisingly it was all like a dream, I got a loan of $ 110,000.00 to paid for my son surgery then get myself a comfortable business to help me going as well. I thank God today is good and you can walk and is working and the burden is longer so much on me more and we can feed well and my family is happy today and i said to myself that I will mourn aloud in the world of the wonders of God to me through this God fearing lender Mr Pedro and I would advise anyone in genuine and serious need of loan to contact this God-fearing man on ...... pedroloanss@gmail.com
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