When you get a student loan, you must try to grab as many scholarships and grants as you can so that you do not borrow the money that you have to return. The amount of money that you get usually needs to be based. The student loans are divided into different kinds:
Federal Loans
The federal government is lending it to you, and they have a preferred interest rate of return which is a little less than the normal loans. The types are given here:
- Federal Subsidized Undergraduate Loans. Subsidized means that the government will this for you while you are in the school.
- Federal Unsubsidized Undergraduate Loans. Unsubsidized means that the federal government will not pay the interest rate for you. The interest rate amount will be added for all the years of your education, and at the end, you have to pay it.
- Federal Unsubsidized Graduate Loans. It means that they do not give you any subsidy when you get into graduation level as now you can earn more and you have better ability to pay back.
Now as a student gets a lot of loans, subsidized and unsubsidized. All these loans would require a certain amount of payment that adds up each month. It becomes a quite significant amount. You can consolidate all your loans into one single loan so that you have just one single payment. This is what we call student loan consolidation.
What you do while consolidating your student loans is that you consolidate with a different lender. The lender pays off all your federal loans. In this way, all loans are paid by the federal government. When this happens, you can no longer use the federal forgiveness program.
If you anticipate that, it’s a kind of difficult decision as you might want to see if you could qualify for the forgiveness program or not. In that case, you might not like to consolidate your student loans. However, if you get a lender and consolidate your loan and he is offering a very low-interest rate, then you have to pay a lot less than you were paying before.
If we talk about the tax on student loan interest payments, the interesting part only, it is tax deductible. It’s not like you will save some money through this. It’s only that you have to pay a little less interest rate each month. There is also a limit set to it above which this condition does not apply on your loan, that is, if you earn a certain amount of money you can avail tax deduction but if above that specific amount then you have no tax deductions. You still pay money for the interest on your loan but at a lower rate than before.
To have extra cash and to pay the loans, you need to work hard as if you are not working; you are not making any money. You would not be able to pay the loans. Also, you have to be careful about your spending.
