Rebecca Ballhaus
speaker
97 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2022
last heard Apr 2022
Rebecca Ballhaus’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
That can be good for borrowers who have multiple loan servicers and want to streamline their monthly payments.
And it can also let you be eligible for certain repayment plans.
But you also want to be careful if you're thinking about consolidating your loans not to end up with a higher interest rate.
The way it works is that if you consolidate your loans, it ends up being the weighted average of the combined loans interest rates.
That's a good option if your loans all have similar interest rates, but if one loan has a significantly higher rate, that'll raise the average and you might end up paying more in interest than you would have in the first place.
And by the way, consolidating your loans is something you can do through the education department.
It just means that you're combining multiple federal education loans into one loan with one single monthly payment instead of multiple payments.
There are a couple things to consider on that.
The first is there are some little tricks you can do.
For example, if you have your loan servicer automatically withdraw monthly payments from your bank account, you can get a 0.25% interest rate deduction on certain loans.
There's also something to consider is refinancing.
That's something where you get a fixed rate private loan through a private company rather than through the federal government.
And in situations where your federal loans have high interest rates and you are able to qualify for a lower rate, this is something that might make sense.
One thing to be wary of there is that it's not reversible.
And it does mean that if you refinance with a private company, you're no longer going to be eligible for any federal forgiveness plans.
So parent plus borrowers have a more limited set of repayment options than students do, but there are still a few ways that you can manage that debt.
The first is that, like with students, you want to look at the payment plans available and see if the monthly payments under the traditional 10-year plans are affordable for you.
If you're struggling to make those monthly payments or if you want to qualify for a federal forgiveness program like public service loan forgiveness, then you should consider loan consolidation.
That lets you become eligible for something called the income contingent repayment plan.
which keeps monthly payments at a certain percentage of your discretionary income, which is based on your family size and your income.
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