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DrBouvenstein posted:I can't imagine any major changes, besides probably just some headaches with getting a new account set up on a new website, and re-doing all my auto-debit information. Apparently not - http://studentaid.ed.gov/about/announcements/sallie-mae#payment-method quote:Will I need to reestablish my preferred payment method for my federal student loans after the name change to Navient in fall 2014?
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Apr 17, 2014 20:54
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Wiggy Marie posted:With private loans, consolidation unfortunately tends to be the only option. You can certainly contact them about other payment plans they might have, and maybe check to see if autodraft payments gets you a bit of an interest break. I wish I could be more helpful Thanks. I'll check into the plan options for the federal loans.
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Apr 17, 2014 22:08
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I'm very close to paying off my loans. Is it a good idea to ask for a letter or account balance or something indicating that I have fully paid them off or is that overly cautious?
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Apr 18, 2014 22:39
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Happiness Commando posted:I'm very close to paying off my loans. Is it a good idea to ask for a letter or account balance or something indicating that I have fully paid them off or is that overly cautious? I don't think that's unreasonable, honestly.
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Apr 18, 2014 23:03
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They should actually send you a paid in full letter automatically once the account is closed, but having more of a paper trail never hurt anything!
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Apr 18, 2014 23:10
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I have a mix of Stafford and GRAD Plus loans (approx 60k) that are coming up close to being due from forbearance. Is there a radical difference between how IBR gets calculated on consolidated federal loans vs Sallie Mae's IBR for the same loans? I ask because, when I put in my info on the .gov consolidation site, it tells me I am not eligible for IBR if consolidating. However, when I talk to Sallie Mae (as well as use their website tools), they are telling me I am eligible for IBR or ICR at a much lower rate. Sallie Mae even said I could do a plan to pay as little as 5 bucks a month for all my loans combined, which is obviously crazy. I'm wondering why there's a huge difference of Sallie Mae options vs options if I consolidate, because the only amount I can really get to with consolidation is about $300 a month. SM is also offering an extended payment plan of 50 bucks a month, which also seems crazy low. I can pay more than 50, but trying to pay no more than 200 if possible.
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Apr 21, 2014 14:03
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I honestly don't know, although it's possible the repayment term plays a factor? Sorry I can't be more help on that one  Alright guys and gals, it's officially time for me to pass the torch to another goon. I have taken a job in another field and will be completely out of the loop in regards to student loans - which means I'd just be giving personal advice rather than regulation-informed advice. I've left the thread open because others have popped in to help, and I won't close this one until a fresh thread is made, but I won't be popping in much anymore. I'd prefer for someone else to make a new thread so that this one can be closed, so that people can PM the new thread owner since I won't be much help anymore. Any volunteers? You are welcome to the OP! Wiggy Marie fucked around with this message at 20:14 on Apr 21, 2014 |
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Apr 21, 2014 20:12
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Thank you Wiggly Marie for your time spent helping us debt-ridden goons!
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Apr 21, 2014 21:02
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Going through my finances, trying to budget stuff out, and I'm close to paying off my stafford loans for my first year of school (through a different program or something so it's a different payment every month loving hooray) plus I was making payments on those the year I went to community college and had stupid amounts of cash floating around. This was a good decision. Notice that my big student loan (the other five semesters) balance doesn't seem to be going down very quickly. Oh, it's because only $80 of the $300 payment I made last month actually went towards the principle. Great. Cool. In ~2 months when my first loan is paid off I can essentially double my payments on my major loan, which will help, but it still feels like I need to maybe prioritize stuff or consolidate my loans (probably not) or something Is there a like, uh, pre-made spreadsheet I can plug my numbers into and figure out how much interest each will accrue over time if I gently caress with payment amounts etc? Here's the dumb spreadsheet I'm currently loving with:  I also may be calculating interest wrong there? Maybe? I'm signed up for automatic payments which means my interest rates go down by 0.25% (  )I think largely what I want to see is how much money I'd be wasting over the next 10 years paying ~400 a month on my student loans vs ~800 a month on my student loans, and if the difference is worth losing a few hundred dollars a month now. e: Though being a year out of college and down to just over $20k is pretty rad, especially knowing what all my friends from high school are going through. e: Also, it really chaps my rear end that when I sign up for automatic payments I can't specify how much money to allot to each loan, and I just have to give them a number and let them allocate it however they do (how do they do?) e: I turned it into eight spreadsheets, one for each loan, which all look sorta like this:  With a set of data for my regular payment and an "improved" payment which I just sorta pulled out of my rear end. Obviously if I pay a loan off quicker that's money that I can put toward a different loan then and I suppose I have more numbers to fudge and aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa am I just overthinking this whole loving thing? Sockser fucked around with this message at 08:32 on Apr 25, 2014 |
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Apr 25, 2014 07:01
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This is the one I always use. http://www.vertex42.com/Calculators/debt-reduction-calculator.html
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Apr 25, 2014 13:05
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Unbury.me works well enough for my purposes but it's admittedly bare bones
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Apr 25, 2014 13:51
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antiga posted:Unbury.me works well enough for my purposes but it's admittedly bare bones This is actually pretty much all I needed. Exactly what I needed. It even gives me a graph. Thanks a bunch!
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Apr 25, 2014 20:39
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Hello helpful goons! I am thinking about consolidating my private loans, mostly because Sallie Mae keeps loving up my payments, and I'd like to just be able to pay in one spot every month (not counting federal loans...hahaha...ha). I also have loans through chase and discover. Is Wells Fargo still the best place to go? Has anyone had luck elsewhere? I have decent credit and also have a willing cosigner with great credit as well if it would pull the interest down a significant amount.
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Apr 26, 2014 06:49
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I've finally decided to apply for IBR. The only problem is that the studentloan.gov website pulls information from my 2012 tax return instead of my 2013 tax return. Is it okay to submit this information, then update it later in the year when the 2013 tax return finally shows up? The alternative documentation form seems like a big hassle, having to print and mail off multiple copies of documents to several different loan servicers. However, I'd rather not get charged with fraud if this isn't legal. Thanks for the help.
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Apr 27, 2014 17:27
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gwarm01 posted:I've finally decided to apply for IBR. The only problem is that the studentloan.gov website pulls information from my 2012 tax return instead of my 2013 tax return. Is it okay to submit this information, then update it later in the year when the 2013 tax return finally shows up? The alternative documentation form seems like a big hassle, having to print and mail off multiple copies of documents to several different loan servicers. However, I'd rather not get charged with fraud if this isn't legal. Thanks for the help. I had the same issue a few years ago, where my income the following year was something like 4-5x the year before and so they'd be pulling very out of date information. All I ended up having to do was to attach a photocopied recent paystub, on which I wrote a (X * 52) figure on some whitespace. That's been good enough for 5 different lenders but you'd want to call and double-check. I was also told that if my income wasn't significantly different from the previous year there was no need for alternate documentation, but you'd want to check the definition of significantly different.
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May 2, 2014 07:32
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So a really pathetic sob story from me; I graduated seven years ago and since then have basically not paid a cent. I did a couple years of deferment, a couple years of forbearance, and now I'm doing IBR which in my case apparently equals $0/month. Obviously I'm doing my best to actually make more money than I am now (so I can stop having $40k in debt constantly hanging over my head  ), but if worse comes to worse can I just continue doing this indefinitely? I know that deferment/forbearance is limited but the IBR doesn't seem to be.I'm asking because I don't want to end up in a situation where I think I'm getting IBR and suddenly I'm slapped with a monthly payment that's almost the cost of my rent 
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May 9, 2014 15:59
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Pikestaff posted:So a really pathetic sob story from me; I graduated seven years ago and since then have basically not paid a cent. I did a couple years of deferment, a couple years of forbearance, and now I'm doing IBR which in my case apparently equals $0/month. If you're on IBR for 25 years, the debt is forgiven (but you have to pay income tax on the forgiven debt). So if you pay $0 and end up in the 15% tax bracket after 25 years, your tax bill will be $6000 that would be due immediately.
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May 9, 2014 16:20
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Hey Look! Sallie owes ME a penny! I really hope they waste the paper and postage to mail me a check.
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May 9, 2014 18:15
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I am so confused on trying to find the best way to pay back my student loans. My total loan amount is ~$60k they are with 2 different companies. approx half have 6.8% interest and the other have show variable interest on the website, but calling the company they said my interest rate is 2.35%. If I look at consolidating into one loan fedloan shows the interest rate will be 8.75% for all of it so I really don't want to do that. I am looking at one of the IBR type repayment plans but when my wife tries to enter her information she gets an error that the national loan db couldn't access her account. This is significant because she has much larger loans than I do. Normally I would look at just paying my loans straight out, but I also have a large amount of recurring medical bills with makes that just not feasible. Sorry if I am rambling on here, I am just so frustrated trying to get this taken care of so I don't have to worry about it and I lost on what to do.
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May 9, 2014 18:21
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Are they loans through a private lender, or federal loans? You can only do IBR on federal loans.
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May 9, 2014 18:55
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EugeneJ posted:Are they loans through a private lender, or federal loans? They are all federal. I got a response through their email system with a phone number to call so I am going to try that next.
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May 9, 2014 19:01
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dalstrs posted:They are all federal. I got a response through their email system with a phone number to call so I am going to try that next. When were the loans taken out? If they're more recent, IBR was replaced by Pay-As-You-Earn, an even better program where the loans are forgiven after 20 years.
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May 9, 2014 19:18
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EugeneJ posted:When were the loans taken out? If they're more recent, IBR was replaced by Pay-As-You-Earn, an even better program where the loans are forgiven after 20 years. The earliest loans were from 2002, but the most rescent are from 2011.
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May 9, 2014 20:05
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EugeneJ posted:If you're on IBR for 25 years, the debt is forgiven (but you have to pay income tax on the forgiven debt). Thanks a ton for info. Hopefully I can sort out my life by that point.
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May 9, 2014 20:10
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dalstrs posted:I am so confused on trying to find the best way to pay back my student loans. My total loan amount is ~$60k they are with 2 different companies. approx half have 6.8% interest and the other have show variable interest on the website, but calling the company they said my interest rate is 2.35%. First off, the variable rate ones are 2.30 + the rate on a 91 day T-note as of the previous July. They will never get any lower and will go higher in the future. You should consolidate the variable rate loans and only the variable rate loans so as to lock in that rate. Then prioritize paying off the higher rate loans.
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May 10, 2014 02:27
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Dik Hz posted:First off, the variable rate ones are 2.30 + the rate on a 91 day T-note as of the previous July. They will never get any lower and will go higher in the future. You should consolidate the variable rate loans and only the variable rate loans so as to lock in that rate. Then prioritize paying off the higher rate loans. Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but consolidating the variable rate loans now seems like a bad idea. Yes, interest will go up, but the Fed has said those increases will be 0.25%-0.50% if whatever metric they're using for the economy improves. You're probably talking several years before that variable interest rate even possibly tops 5%, let alone 8%. Yeah, he can lock in a lovely rate now, but he'd just be screwing himself for years to come. That said, even though the variable rates are lower, I would consider prioritizing them because the longer they are around the bigger the risk factor of interest rates increasing.
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May 10, 2014 04:32
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RogueLemming posted:Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but consolidating the variable rate loans now seems like a bad idea. Yes, interest will go up, but the Fed has said those increases will be 0.25%-0.50% if whatever metric they're using for the economy improves. You're probably talking several years before that variable interest rate even possibly tops 5%, let alone 8%. Yeah, he can lock in a lovely rate now, but he'd just be screwing himself for years to come. Not really. Fixed rates give you certainty and stability. You will always know what you will owe the next month. Considering the fact that raising the minimum wage has been in the news lately, if you have the means to make consistent payments on these loans (don't need to use forbearance/or you already used it up), consolidation is probably a good choice right now.
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May 10, 2014 06:15
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RogueLemming posted:Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but consolidating the variable rate loans now seems like a bad idea. Yes, interest will go up, but the Fed has said those increases will be 0.25%-0.50% if whatever metric they're using for the economy improves. You're probably talking several years before that variable interest rate even possibly tops 5%, let alone 8%. Yeah, he can lock in a lovely rate now, but he'd just be screwing himself for years to come. You can lock in the variable interest loans at their current rate. They will never get lower unless the yield on a 91-day T-note goes negative. There is no risk if you lock them in. In the past 10 years, that means his interest rate could be anywhere from 2.3 to 7.4%. Looking back 25, they could be as high as 10.5%. Also if the balance is >$20k on the part he consolidates, it resets the term to 20 years. There is no downside to locking in the rates now. If someone offered me a loan at 2.25% interest rate on a 20 year note and let me deduct the interest above-board on my taxes, I'd take as much money as they'd be willing to throw at me.
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May 10, 2014 12:07
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Dik Hz posted:You can lock in the variable interest loans at their current rate. They will never get lower unless the yield on a 91-day T-note goes negative. There is no risk if you lock them in. In the past 10 years, that means his interest rate could be anywhere from 2.3 to 7.4%. Looking back 25, they could be as high as 10.5%. Also if the balance is >$20k on the part he consolidates, it resets the term to 20 years. There is no downside to locking in the rates now. How do I do that?
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May 10, 2014 19:16
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dalstrs posted:How do I do that? http://www.loanconsolidation.ed.gov/index.html
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May 10, 2014 20:56
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That shows my estimated consolidation interest of 6.85%.
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May 10, 2014 23:30
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So, weird question. About a month ago, I got my loan offer for fall and spring of this upcoming school year. It's the first time I've taken out loans, and they offered me the maximum ($8,700) for both semesters. I accepted, did the loan counseling on the student loan website, all that. Then a week ago, my mother, through a friend, heard about a program Texas has where if you are considered deaf, your tuition can be paid for. I went and got tested by my audiologist, and I qualify. Since my loans are for fall and won't be disbursed for a while, can I call my loan servicer and get them to lower the amount of money I'm going to take out, now that my tuition's covered? I'll need far less to cover my costs, and it'll make it much easier for me to become debt-free.
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May 11, 2014 00:25
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When I made an adjustment to the amount of a Federal loan, I did it at the Bursar's Office at my school. I suggest you try the same, or the student aid office, if they are separate at your school. I suppose in the worst case, you could just immediately pay back the portion that you don't want.
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May 11, 2014 00:35
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dalstrs posted:That shows my estimated consolidation interest of 6.85%. Are you including all loans or just the variable rate ones?
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May 11, 2014 01:29
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Wickerman posted:Not really. Fixed rates give you certainty and stability. You will always know what you will owe the next month. Yeah, but it becomes a question of what rate is certain. I'd rather take a little risk paying ~2.5% than be certain of paying 6%, at least for the near future. Dik Hz posted:You can lock in the variable interest loans at their current rate. In that case I would agree, but I don't see how likely that is. Typically, it's a lower rate precisely because it's variable. If you could just take out a variable rate loan at 4% less interest and then lock in that rate, everyone would be doing it that way. When you consolidate to a fixed rate, you pay for that certainty with a higher interest rate.
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May 11, 2014 02:05
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Dik Hz posted:Are you including all loans or just the variable rate ones? All the variable rate ones are with the same company, I don't see a way to just consolidate those and lock in the lower rate.
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May 11, 2014 02:19
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RogueLemming posted:Yeah, but it becomes a question of what rate is certain. I'd rather take a little risk paying ~2.5% than be certain of paying 6%, at least for the near future. It's kinda funny, the conversion from variable (2.3% + 91-day T-note) to fixed rate (6.8%) was heralded as relief for borrowers to hedge against raising interest rates. Guess where, on the chart below, the federal government managed to lock in student loan rates.  10 years history of 3-month T-Note rate Answer spoilered below: 
Dik Hz fucked around with this message at 02:45 on May 11, 2014 |
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May 11, 2014 02:32
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dalstrs posted:All the variable rate ones are with the same company, I don't see a way to just consolidate those and lock in the lower rate. My memory is a bit fuzzy since I did this last March, but at the end of the application, it asks you which student loans you wish to include in the consolidation. Which company are your variable rate loans through? I thought you said you had all federal loans.
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May 11, 2014 02:34
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Better hope the co-signers of your private loans don't die or declare bankruptcy: http://www.thestate.com/2014/05/10/3437789/some-grieving-student-loan-borrowers.html?sp=/99/101/ quote:Some student loan borrowers who had a parent or grandparent co-sign the note are finding that they must immediately pay the loan in full if the relative dies. 
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May 12, 2014 02:00
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For essentially no other reason than forgetfulness/laziness, my wife has missed several fedloan payments and been dinged half a dozen times on her credit report for it. Does anyone here have any success negotiating with fedloan to remove them in exchange for automatic payments or anything else? We can pay them, no problem, but these marks are killing her credit score.
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May 19, 2014 15:04
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