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Consider These Factors to Ease Educational Debt Burden
Tweet Share on Facebook November 30, 2011 CommentWe hope you all had an excellent Thanksgiving and enjoyed some hearty feasting. We're still walking around in a post-turkey (or Tofurky) haze.
But with application deadlines for college and grad school looming, now is the time to start considering educational debt as a complete picture and map out how you will cover the costs of your education before, during, and even after you graduate. Here's some insight into the factors you should consider when choosing schools in order to ease the burden of educational debt.
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Here's a Brief Primer on Fixed-Rate Private Student Loans
Tweet Share on Facebook November 23, 2011 Comment (2)The number of private lenders—such as Wells Fargo, U.S. Bank, and Charter One—offering fixed-rate student loans has nearly doubled over the past year to about a dozen. There is little doubt that other banks will jump in soon with their own offerings.
If you do have to take out private loans, it's probably a good idea to compare the drawbacks and benefits of fixed versus variable rate private loans and, since we've been getting questions about this change, we are going to review some of the basics here.
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New Report Examines College Student Debt
Tweet Share on Facebook November 16, 2011 CommentThe Project on Student Debt has released its Student Debt and the Class of 2010 report. As in previous reports, it provides an overview of the student debt situation nationally and then breaks down the information by state (it even has a neat interactive map) and by college. The report closes with some notes on private loans. We can't think of a better way to do it, so we'll take you through the data the same way.
The national picture: First, it's important to recognize that the report hones in on the cumulative student loan debt of recent graduates from four-year public and private nonprofit colleges. It does not include for-profit colleges because so few of them report the necessary student data.
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Learn What Obama's Student Loan Plan Means for You
Tweet Share on Facebook November 9, 2011 Comment (47)We promised in last week's post that this week we would cover the details of President Obama's new executive order to make it easier for students to repay their federal student loans. For your convenience, we'll break this into three parts:
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Student Loan Change Comes On Little Cat Feet
Tweet Share on Facebook November 2, 2011 Comment (2)Even though it's mailbag week, we would be remiss not to mention that the Obama administration recently announced important new initiatives that will help student loan borrowers. (Yes, we know, it's not FDR at Madison Square Garden.)
We will have a lot more in next week's blog on the proposals to accelerate changes to Income-Based Repayment (briefly, new borrowers in 2012 will benefit from a lower monthly payment cap and loan forgiveness after 20 rather than 25 years) and to encourage borrowers to convert federally guaranteed loans disbursed by private banks (FFEL loans) to Federal Direct Loans.
