Although graduation is an exciting time for college students, it also signals the onset of student loan repayment. If you’ve attended college for several years and accumulated a foreboding amount of debt from multiple lenders, you may be dreading paying back your loans. Although you have a 6-month grace period following graduation before repayment must begin, the time can pass very quickly – especially if you are job hunting or starting out with a new career in a new apartment in a new city.
One way to put your mind at ease about repayment is to plan ahead to consolidate student loan debt you’ve accumulated over the years. Trying to make payments as scheduled to multiple lenders is likely to prove financially challenging as well as difficult to manage logistically. Instead of setting yourself up to have to deal with such a burden, plan to consolidate student loan debt instead.
When you consolidate student loan debt, you essentially borrow enough from a single lender to have all your student loans paid off. You then need to make just one monthly payment to the lender you choose to consolidate student loan debt. Not only will you have less difficulty paying only one lender instead of several, your payments are likely to be much lower than the combined payments you would have had to make if you didn’t consolidate student loan debt.
Your repayment terms may be extended significantly when you consolidate student loan debt, but this doesn’t mean you can’t pay your loan off ahead of time. Your lender will explain how repayment of your new loan used to consolidate student loan debt works, and you can determine how quickly you wish to pay your loan off.