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I was thinking about this last night. What's the standard repayment time period on a Federal student loan? My grace period ended last month and I made my first payment, and I was wondering how long it would take to pay off paying the minimums. Is it a 10 year loan?
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Aug 9, 2010 16:35
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Wiggy Marie posted:FISHMANPET, you got it on the first guess. These loans default to a 10 year repayment unless the loan balance is too low to be paid off in ten years with a 50/month payment (so 3,000.00 wouldn't take 10 full years to pay off, for instance). There are a couple of ways to extend repayment if you need a lower payment for now. One is the extended repayment plan if you have enough of a balance, the other is consolidation. No, the $200 a month payment ($16,000 principal) is quite alright for me. I'm hoping I'll be able to pay it off early once my credit card debt goes away. Now the fiancee and her $35,000, that could be another story.
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Aug 9, 2010 23:20
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Wiggy Marie posted:The nice thing about any method you choose is that there is never an early payoff penalty. So even if you two decide to consolidate her loans, you can pay them off as early as you'd like. Yeah, I made sure of no prepayment penalty when I first took the loans (although not sure what I would have done if there was a prepayment penalty).
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Aug 10, 2010 03:07
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FAFSA is just an application. Everybody is "eligible" to fill it out. The results tell you what grants or loans that you are eligible for.
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Jan 4, 2011 07:16
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Question about deferment and income based repayment. My FIANCE is just about to finish her Master's, and is sitting on a boat load of loan debt. She'll hopefully be starting her doctorate in the fall, and thus will basically be fine. However, she might not get in until spring because of some Application snafus, and she will be unemployed starting in August. So I guess multiple questions: 1) Can she get an in-school deferment if she'll be out for a semester, even if she won't have a definite yes if she's been accepted to the program or not (she will be, as everybody on the faculty committee wants her in the program, but they won't make an official decision for quite a while). 2) How long can she get away not paying anything while unemployed? As for the total size of the debt, we're not really too worried about that, as she's going into education, and that means she'll be able to do income based repayment for 10 years and write the rest off, right? And will my income have any bearing on how much she has to pay?
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Apr 4, 2011 16:54
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Kneel Before Zog posted:Wait, you mean I have to wait 6 months before I can start repaying this loan. Since I am on an unsubsidized loan, interest starts to accumulate immediately, I'd rather start paying it weekly or at least monthly as soon as I get it. Its not that I want more funding, I just want them to not charge me interest while in school as those with the subsidized loans receive. Don't worry about paying anything until your loan is almost out of deferment. You can see how much interest you've accumulated, and just pay that off before you're out of deferment. Until that point, interest is only charged on the principal, not on interest you've earned. Once you're out of deferment it "capitalizes" and it turns into interest on the principal + accumulated interest, so just pay off that interest once before it capitalizes, and you'll be fine.
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Aug 19, 2011 16:36
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Wiggy Marie posted:FISHMANPET, it is much much easier to pay everything in small payments than in one large chunk at the end. Also, a series of smaller payment will almost guaranteed start hitting principal balance instead of just interest, which will benefit them greatly once they're graduated. What I remember right before my six month in school deferment ended is they sent me a letter that said I had $500 in interest exclusively on the principal (they weren't charging interest on the accrued interest), and if I paid it before the 6 months were up it wouldn't capitalize, and if I didn't pay it, not only would it capitalize, but they would add back interest charged on the earned interest, so that when I didn't pay, my total balance was $1000 more than I'd borrowed, rather than only $500. Or at least that's how I interpreted it. Anyway, My monthly payment is $181.xx, but I'd like to pay an even $200, what's the easiest way to do that automatically? Right now I'm having my payment taken out automatically ever month via dl.ed.gov, giving me the 1/4% interest rate deduction. Is there a way I can set that up to take out $200 instead of statement balance, or do I need to set up a series of scheduled payments for $20 a month?
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Aug 23, 2011 17:58
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Kneel Before Zog posted:I don't think I have deferment. My loan is unsubsidized stafford loan which means I take interest immediately. What's really annoying is I honestly only requested 3250. Say they up'ed my loan limit. I asked them why. They said because of my grades if I read the email right. They being my in state florida university. The thing is they not only raised the amount I can take out but had me take out more. Now I've taken out 3700 hundred instead of 3250 and I can swear I never changed the amount I had written in originally. Interest isn't deferred, but payments are.
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Sep 20, 2011 15:43
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My fiancée has a bunch of loans with direct loans. She finished her masters in the spring, and is currently getting a PhD. She just got a letter today that her loans are going into repayment starting the end of November. She called, and she has to fill out a form and the school has to fill it out, but the form could take a month to process, but she's only got 45 days. Assuming the forms don't get filed in time, what else can she do? E: and because the website is hosed, she can't get a copy of the form online, she has to have it mailed to her. FISHMANPET fucked around with this message at 02:11 on Oct 18, 2011 |
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Oct 18, 2011 01:25
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Effexxor posted:If she's in school at least half time there is nothing to worry about. Negative credit reporting, late fees, even default can be reversed if the student was in school at least half time. She'll be fine. What does she have to do to make sure it gets reverse, if it comes to that? The women she got on the phone was kind of a bitch, and basically ended up yelling at my fiancee for not knowing how to fill out this form. Would a sane customer rep know how to deal with her situation, or does she need to do something special/escalate? What she's worried most is the interest capitalizing. By the time she graduates she'll be able to pay it off before it capitalizes, but if it goes into repayment right now she won't have the money to pay off the interest (or even make payments period). Can capitalization be reverse?
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Oct 19, 2011 21:22
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Effexxor posted:A sane customer representative will know how to deal. For the credit dispute she'd just have to send her credit report and a letter and enrollment verification form showing that she was in school at the time, she just has to request that the late fees be removed if there are any but generally that happens automatically and as for capitalization, it will be reversed if it does capitalized and if it doesn't, she can request it and they will need to do it. Your username is the drug she just got put on yesterday  We're not sure why they don't know she's in school, when she made the switch from undergrad to masters she didn't have to do anything. A friend of ours found the form online and she filled it out and got the school to fill out out and send it off, so hopefully we'll be fine, but I'll let her know that it can all be reversed.
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Oct 19, 2011 23:18
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I just set Kwikpay to pay an extra $15 per month, bringing my payment to an even $200, and saves me $500 in interest and 11 months of payments.
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Oct 28, 2011 04:27
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mitztronic posted:Thanks for the reply. My loan payments are ~$1050 with extended plan (I don't qualify for IBR because they don't take into account cost of living, thanks!) so I'm going to have to start living out of my car soon. My grandparents gave me $5k (god bless) to put towards my loans and they thought it was going to pay for a large amount or something, so I'm using that as a buffer since I cant afford more than $500 a month, which gives me almost a year to sell all my stuff and blow my brains out. How in the everloving gently caress did you spend $300k on college? My fiancee is going to come out of her Doctorate program with less than $100k (granted, her parents paid for 3 years of undergrad, but that's only $35k more.
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Dec 7, 2011 02:44
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)and the other I still have to figure out.
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MrKatharsis posted:Who the hell takes out loans for a doctorate? I thought almost all PhDs got tuition remission and a stipend. Yeah, if you get a PhD in something with a ton of grant money. She's getting an educational doctorate, so no such luck, though she does get a good bit of tuition paid for now with her assitanceship, so welp. And I didn't realize you were talking about principal plus interest.
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Dec 7, 2011 05:40
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| # ¿ Apr 24, 2024 22:05 |
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Mathematically the cheapest option is to be continuously paying your loan, like some kind of calculus poo poo. The most expensive is to pay once a month. Where you want to be between those two points depends how inconvenienced you want to be. But enroll and Quickpay and that will be the cheapest. If you want to make extra payments you can tack them on now, or manually make a second payment.
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Dec 29, 2011 07:11
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