I recently got the following question from one of my readers:
Dear The Man,
I’m a broke ass college student. And by broke I mean not only don’t I have any money, but I’ve probably already spent about 2 years worth of my expected salary after graduation. And that’s if I DON”T go to grad school!
What should I do?
Your fan,
Broke Dope
Well Brokemeister, don’t worry. Lots of people incur mountains of debt while attending school. Some of them even actually do it on tuition and books! But regardless of what you’ve blown it on, there are solutions for student consolidation of debt.
First of all, be wary of web sites promising “Best Consolidation Loan Student”, “Federal consolidation Loan”, “Federal Loan consolidation”, “Student Loan Consolidation” and more. Heck, that ain’t even proper grammer! Those are just keywords that people are loading into a page in order to get their search results up to the top of the pack (just like this one!). You see, college loan consolidation is a serious business and student loan refinancing attracts unscrupulous lenders.
So, if you’re going to consolidate student loans you need to stick to the big reputable sites. And here is the main list:
- Sallie Mae’s Federal student loan consolidation
- Bank of America’s Federal student consolidation loans
- U.S. Department of Education’s Direct Loan Program
- Federal Student Loan Interest Rate and Consolidation Fact Sheet
- Don’t forget Wikipedia’s entry on Federal Student Loan Consolidation
PS – For my regular readers, this page was not a real question, but is a search engine test… If you’ve got a blog and could link to this page to help test a theory it would be fantastic.
{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
Haha I’m amused that this is just a test. Thankfully, though, I don’t actually have student debt otherwise I would have had my hopes dashed upon reading and finding no new useful insight.
Man, never mind… here in the philippines it is even written on the bank-notes: study now-pay later,
look here
cheers
Rhoody
I have two sons who we assisted in there college financing, still, together after graduating from a 5 year and graduate program, they will have a collective debt of over 100,000 USD.
No problem – I was just talking to my friend about exactly this topic yesterday! Post coming…
John, interesting idea, will you let us know how it turns out?
RHB – $100,000 !! Crikey.
I personally believe that we need to fund our youngsters to achieve what are capable of. We have a student loan scheme which doesn’t require any form of repayment until the individual gets a job paying a certain level of salary. Still means that they start work saddled with debt though.
At one point, students were declaring bankruptcy to avoid repayment but the powers to be shut that loophole.
Steve
Thanks John for informative article.