Consolidating School Loans - Any Advice?

[onewhippedpuppy]

As my God-awful college experience draws to a close, I'm starting to look at the most bittersweet part of graduation - school loans. The unfortunate side of going to college with a wife and two kids is being able to support your family, and pay for tuition and books. Not happening. Anyway, does anyone have advice regarding consolidation? Most of the brochures that our financial aid dept has are from lenders, and I don't take "advice" from someone that wants to sell me something. All I care about it getting these damn things paid off as quickly as is humanly possible.

[Porsche-O-Phile]

Now is probably a good time to do it. I consolidated mine a couple years ago and locked in a pretty nice low rate.

Assuming there's another Fed cut (or two) I may actually consider doing it again. I never thought I'd get better than I have right now (3.0% fixed) but it's possible before things start creeping up again (which I have every reason to suspect they will before too long).

If you're like me, you'll get multiple offers. Shop around and get the best one. In addition to my low fixed rate, my company gave me a check for 2% of the loan balance with 12 consecutive on-time payments and a guarantee not to re-consolidate with another company during that time (which has now expired). On an $80k loan, that was a check for $1600. Not bad. I imagine there are companies offering similar incentives right now. Check around.

[legion]

I consolidated (my single loan) to lock-in the interest rate.

Do it if you want to keep your current rate.

Wait a little while if you think rates will go lower.

From what I gathered, you can do this once and only once.

[onewhippedpuppy]

Suggestions as to legit companies to contact?

[Porsche-O-Phile]

Mine is with Great Lakes. I haven't had any problems with them and you can do all your transactions online, which is nice.

[Noah930]

Originally Posted by legion

From what I gathered, you can do this once and only once.

I think that once you have consolidated down to one loan, you can no longer re-consolidate. However, if you still have multiple loans (i.e. you consolidated, then got more loans), then you can consolidate again.

[onewhippedpuppy]

Yes, you can only consolidate once.

[dan79brooklyn]

I also had Great Lakes. I consolidated then the rates dropped even more which sucked, but I only owed 20K (still a lot, but less than some people I know). I paid off last year, every time I had extra money I put it towards the loan. I'm now debt free and have excellent credit as a result.