UCS Hellmaker posted:

Tbh doing it in spring last year would have been the best option. We managed to get my wife a 3.5 interest rate on a 15 year (I wanted to lower the interest and we already pay double. Doing this gave us breathing room if something comes up but also meant that if I keep paying extra I lowered the total interest paid by 3xs). You won't find any private loan that does interest based repayment, they aren't the feds and absolutely know they have you by the balls and can squeeze endlessly. And if you delay or miss a payment they just instantly capitalize the interest and you end up paying even more per month. It's absolutely a massive stress and fracture point on anyone that ends up stuck with them. My wife had 3 from Wells Fargo that went from 9 to 13% interest and the only way I managed to start paying them off after 6 years was by refinancing to a much better rate. The high interests that she was saddled with made it so the one year defferrement we had wiped everything we put in the prior 5. poo poo fuckers

Right now I think your honestly screwed trying to lower it to 5%. A coworker was trying to refinance and she barely was able to get below 8% and that's with a steady job and good record. Private loans are basically just a weight on you. There's a website I used to aggregate interest rates on refinancing, I'll look and see what it was. I used that to find out which place would give us the best options.

I will say sofi is useless and don't use them if it's an option. We ended up using a credit union that does private refinance that gave us good discounts on everything.