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Is A Student Loan Consolidation Or Federal Student Loan Consolidation Right For You? (Page 1 of 2)
With the cost of education going through the roof, going to college can be very costly. Many students dont have thousands of dollars to pay their way through college. This is why so many college students use student loans and federal student loans to get themselves through college. When it comes time to pay back their student loans, it can be a real burden and a distraction from their career.
Todays career minded students can get help with the burden of having several student loans. One can focus on their chosen career, instead of losing sleep over paying several monthly student loan payments. Student loan consolidation and federal student loan consolidation can be the solution with several benefits.
How Does Student Loan Consolidation Work?
Here is typically how a student consolidation loan works. When a student first applied for several loans from several different agencies and student loan providers, they each gave a different interest rate and term for paying back the loans.
The idea of student loan consolidation, is to take all the different student loans and put them into one easy convenient loan. You then only have to make one monthly loan payment every month, instead of several loan payments every month over time.
This saves the student both time and money. Having a lower interest rate and less checks to write every month are a couple of the many bebefits of doing a student loan consolidation or federal student loan consolidation.
What About Federal Student Loan Consolidation?
There are several advantages when you get a federal student loan consolidation. You can take advantage of fixed interest rates, lower monthly payments, one payment each month, get payment incentives and new or renewed deferments.
There is usually not a minimum loan balance required with this type of loan program. Also, you have the option of which loans you may want to include and money saving payment incentive plans with some federal student loan consolidation programs.
Another benefit is that you can consolidate your undergraduate loans if you are still in graduate school. You can decide on what loans you want to consolidate from the loans that qualify.
However, federal student consolidation loans cant include loans you may have received from banks, credit unions, personal loans, consumer debt loans or any other type of financial service loans you may have applied for in the past. They have to be federal student loans to qualify.
8 Helpful Benefits From Student Loan Consolidation
1. Lower Monthly Payments. Depending on your student loan situation and the type of lender you choose, you may be able to lower your monthly payments by up to 50%
2. Having Simple Loan Payments. By consolidating your student loans, you only have one loan payment per month and one check to write. This is very beneficial if you are writing several checks every month to multiple lenders.
Why So Many Loan Modifications Fail and How to Seek Help
For millions of homeowners struggling to pay their mortgage, many are faced with falling home values which makes it hard to either sell or refinance. Therefore, many homeowners make the painful decision to simply walk away rather than fighting to stay afloat and keep their home. Financially speaking, it does make a lot of sense for many underwater homeowners to walk away or short sell because for some, it may take them many years to break even and start to have positive equity. However, not everyone falls in this category. The reasons are many, such as: (1) if you are planning to hold on to your house for a long time, you could break even and then start to have positive equity again; (2) perhaps you have personal goals to hold on to your house because you enjoy having your family living in it. So just because lots of people are walking away does not make it the right answer for everyone. This would be similar to doing what everyone else was doing during the bubble, which was to buy a house because everyone was.
In an effort to help some of these homeowners who wanted to save their home, loan modification programs have become one of the primary rescue effort. Loan modifications help make the mortgage payment more affordable so that people can keep their homes.
Unfortunately, these programs can be very challenging and at times fail to help the homeowners because the process to qualify for one and get approved for one is super complicated.
On one hand, banks make the process very difficult. In fact, some research shows that it was much easier for most people to obtain mortgages when they purchased their homes than it is now to apply for loan modifications. Many believe that banks do not have the proper infrastructure in place to deal with so many loan modification applications. Other believe that the banks are giving people the run-around on purpose.
On the other hand, they are lots of people who apply for loan modifications the wrong way not adequately knowing what they are getting into, or what will be expected of them. They submit their applications and wait for months hoping for the positive answer. Well, for most people, and this is a sad but true fact, if they are not financially pre-qualified they won’t get a positive response. What homeowners need to do is not only demonstrate to investors and lenders that modifying their current loan is more cost-effective than foreclosure, but that they are able to make the new modified payment.
So instead of applying unprepared, it would be better to know ahead of time whether you could qualify for a loan modification. This is vital to know because if you don’t qualify for the new terms, then the modification could be denied, anyway. And if you are not pre-qualified, perhaps fine-tuning your budget, i.e. lowering your debt, taking the train instead of owning the car, could help you get qualified. The decision whether to apply is 100% up to you, but having guidance can save you time and money, and increases your chances of approval for a loan modification. So here are some of the pre-qualification criteria that are considered crucial and this is where you need guidance with:
1. Your front-end debt-to-income ratio must be above 31% of your gross income prior to the modification.
2. Your house target payment, also known as PITIA (principal, interest, taxes, insurance, and association dues), has to be lowered to be at 31%-38% of your gross income after the modification in order to meet the HAMP guidelines. This is done in three steps. (1) Your house payment target is achieved by lowering your interest rate to no more than 2% with a 30 year loan term. (2) If the target is not reached, then your loan term is extended up to 40 years in order to try and reach the new house target payment. (3) The third step is to either provide you with a loan forbearance or a balance reduction if the target payment is not reached in steps 1 and 2. And this is the tricky part. There are relatively few loan modifications that have received a balance reduction. Additionally, as far as the forbearance option goes, this is very relative to your case; there is no size fit all, basically, the loan modification program guidelines do not give one percentage forbearance ratio for everyone.
So now you are wondering if you should become a mathematician in order to figure all the ratios and calculations involved in a loan modification. You sort of do if you are going to figure it out on your own. The alternative option is to seek out help where you can get unbiased, conflict-free analysis for your loan modification potential.
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