You can apply for your student loan consolidation in minutes, either online or with a quick phone call to NextStudent. It’s fast, easy, and free to apply, and there are NO fees, NO credit checks, and NO co-signers required.
There are also no prepayment penalties on your Federal Consolidation Loan. When you consolidate your student loans with NextStudent, you’ll never be charged extra for paying more than the minimum each month or for paying off your student loan consolidation early.
Who’s Eligible for Student Loan Consolidation?
To be eligible to consolidate your own federal student loans, you can’t currently be enrolled in school more than half time. The student loans you’re looking to consolidate must be in repayment, in a grace period, or in an authorized deferment or forbearance period.
Your parents can consolidate the PLUS loans they took out to help you pay for school as soon as those student loans have been fully disbursed and have entered repayment, even if you’re still in school full time. Although your parents can consolidate their PLUS loans, you won’t be able to consolidate your own college loans with your parents’ loans.
Student Loan Consolidation for Private Student Loans
If you have private student loans in addition to (or instead of) your federal student loans, you won’t be able to consolidate your private student loans under the federal student loan consolidation program. But you may be eligible to consolidate your private student loans separately with a Private Consolidation Loan, which offers the same convenience of a single consolidated loan for your private student loans.
NextStudent believes that getting an education is the best investment you can make, and we’re dedicated to helping you pursue your education dreams by making college funding simple. Learn more about Student Loans, Private Student Loans and Student Loan Consolidation at NextStudent.com.
NextStudent, a leading Phoenix-based education funding company, offers a student loan consolidation program with no application fees, no processing fees, and no credit checks. By consolidating your parent or student loans, your monthly payments could go down by up to 42%.
Here’s an example: Estimated monthly payments on a $75,000 NextStudent Federal Consolidation Loan fixed at 7.25% and repaid over an extended term of 30 years are $512, versus estimated monthly payments of $879 on a $75,000 Federal Stafford Loan issued at 7.22% and repaid over 10 years — a 41.8% reduction in monthly payment amount. (Your actual payment reduction may vary and will depend on the terms of the student loans you’re consolidating.)
Replace Your Variable-Rate Student Loans With One Fixed-Rate Student Loan Consolidation
If you took out your Federal PLUS Loans or Stafford Loans prior to July 1, 2006, those student loans are subject to variable interest rates that will adjust every year. So when interest rates rise, your monthly student loan payments may also go up. Student loan consolidation puts an end to rate increases and rising payments.
NextStudent’s student loan consolidation program gives you the security of a fixed interest rate. By consolidating your federal college loans with NextStudent, you’ll replace your variable-rate college loans with a fixed-rate student loan consolidation loan and lock in your new monthly payments, so you’ll never have to worry about interest rates rising and leaving you guessing about your monthly payment amount.
Federal PLUS parent loans and Stafford student loans are issued with standard repayment terms of 10 years. You may be able to get up to 30 years to repay these federal parent and student loans when you consolidate them into a student loan consolidation.
How long you get to repay will depend on the total outstanding balance of your education debt: If your outstanding education debt totals $20,000 – $39,999, you’ll have 20 years to pay back your student loan consolidation.? If your outstanding education debt totals $40,000 – $59,999, you’ll have 25 years. If you have $60,000 or more in education debt when you consolidate your federal student loans, you’ll have 30 years to pay back your Federal student loan consolidation.
Even though you can get more time to repay your federal parent and student loans by consolidating, there are no prepayment penalties on a Federal Consolidation Loan, so you won’t be assessed any additional fees for paying more than the minimum each month or for paying off your student loan consolidation early, should you choose to.
There are also no application fees, no processing fees, and no credit checks when you consolidate through the federal student loan consolidation program.
If you took out your Federal PLUS Loans or Stafford Loans prior to July 1, 2006, those loans are subject to variable interest rates that will adjust every year. So when interest rates rise, your monthly student loan payments may also go up. But you can put an end to rate increases and rising payments when you consolidate your parent or student loans.
The federal student loan consolidation program gives you the security of a fixed interest rate. By consolidating your federal
student loans, you’ll replace your variable-rate college loans with a fixed-rate consolidation loan, so you won’t have to worry about interest rates rising and leaving you guessing about your monthly payment amount.
If you have multiple student loans in repayment and you’re dealing with the hassle of multiple bills, multiple due dates, and multiple monthly payments to multiple lenders, a Federal Consolidation Loan could help make your student loan repayment easier to manage.
With the federal student loan consolidation program, you can bundle all your eligible federal parent or student loans into one single consolidation loan with just one monthly bill, one lender, and one monthly payment that’s fixed for the life of your consolidation loan.
If you have private student loans in addition to you r federal student loans, you won’t be able to consolidate your private student loans under the federal student loan consolidation program. But you may be able to consolidate your private student loans separately with a Private Consolidation Loan, which offers the same convenience of a single consolidated loan for your private student loans.
Even with this legislation in place, however, lenders continue to find themselves forced to suspend their student loan programs. As recently as July 28, the Brazos Higher Education Service Corp., the 26th-largest originator of federal student loans in 2007, and the Massachusetts Educational Financing Authority, the largest student loan issuer to Massachusetts residents, both announced that they would no longer be able to provide either new or current borrowers with student loans.
As the suspensions of both federal and private student loan programs keep spreading through all types of lenders — large and small; for-profit and nonprofit; banks, non-banks, and credit unions; state loan agencies and schools-as-lenders — students and their families are finding themselves with fewer borrowing options to get the parent and student loans they need to pay the fall tuition bills that are coming due over these next few weeks.
Two Major Lenders the Latest Casualties of Student Loan Crisis
The Brazos Group, a primarily nonprofit group of higher education lending, servicing, and other financial aid companies, first announced that it would stop offering federal college loans back n March. In May, however, after the government passed the Ensuring Continued Access to Student Loans Act, Brazos once again began offering federal parent and student loans, saying that the government’s short-term liquidity plan had renewed the organization’s confidence in its ability to continue offering student loans.
But Brazos once again suspended its education lending program late last month, citing continued turmoil in the student loan industry.
Brazos Executive Vice President Ellis Tredway said his organization simply “ran out of time to get everything in place” to issue new student loans for the fall.
The Massachusetts Educational Financing Authority, which issued more than $500 million in college loans to 40,000 Massachusetts college students and their families last year, had already suspended its federal student loan program in April. Now, MEFA has also pulled the plug on its non-federal private loan program, which provided Massachusetts students with fixed-rate private student loans.
“While we continue to pursue every possible option, raising the necessary funds to offer fixed–interest rate private education loans is taking longer than originally projected and has become even more challenging,” said Tom Graf, MEFA’s executive director.
Students Face the Uncertainty of Switching Lenders
With over 8 million students and parents having turned to federal college loans in 2006–07, according to the College Board, the number or families that stand to be affected by the ongoing wave of lender departures this year is not unsubstantial.
Last week, financial aid officers at Texas A&M University — a school with over 54,000 students — heard from seven different lenders warning that they would no longer be able to offer federal student loans, a situation that has made more than a few borrowers uneasy.
Dyneche Duffield, an incoming college student headed to Houston Baptist University, is uncomfortable with the prospect of having to establish a relationship with a new lender other than her local bank, which used to offer student loans.
“I would have much rather taken out a loan there than somewhere where I didn’t know anyone,” Duffield said.
While students like Duffield may still be able to go directly to the Department of Education for their federal college loans or find those remaining lenders who are still offering private student loans (albeit with more stringent credit criteria that are making it harder for students to qualify), the magnitude of the problem within the student loan credit markets and how deeply it has permeated the college loan industry is alarming to many administrators and officials in higher education.
Kathryn Osmond, executive director of student financial services at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, finds the situation with MEFA to be particularly indicative of a long-lasting and serious problem.
“An economy that is in such a tailspin that it affects a critical agency like MEFA,” said Osmond, “is an economy that scares me.”
People generally find it tough to pay back student loans because the loan installments are not calculated keeping in mind other types of student loan debt. Most students also accumulate a number of other loans like huge credit card bills and car loan, which also require financing upon graduation. The best way of getting out of this kind of debt trap is to go in for student loan consolidation. A student loan consolidation program can be a lifesaver for a student and can totally turnaround a negative student loan debt situation to one of good fortune.
There is no logical reason not to seek out student loan consolidation. By finding a student loan consolidation program that meets their personal student loan debt needs, students can avoid defaulting on payments which will leave a permanent red mark on life long credit history. This would make it difficult to get any kind of financing when necessary in the future. On the other hand, by undertaking student loan consolidation, there is the opportunity to easily reduce student loan debt or in some cases eliminate the student loan debt while obviously at the same time streamlining finances and budget. Most student loan consolidation programs also offer credit counseling, which will help you in managing your finances wisely in the future.
The student loan consolidation company pays off all of the student loan debt. This means that the student loan consolidation program payment will be the only payment obligation and can be paid off in easy monthly installments. Students have the option to pay back student loan consolidation charges over a period ten to thirty years. With student loan consolidation, student loan debt has been reduced or eliminated with future obligations becoming due at a time when more earning power is likely. To apply online for student loan consolidation where student loan debt lenders compete and where students can lower their monthly student loan debt payment up to 70 %, students visit: Studentdebtconsolidationprograms.com
Student loan consolidation programs are presented with the goal of reducing student loan debt with students in mind.