Financing College Education and Repaying Student Loans - Part II
This is the 2nd part of a two part series on college funding and student loan repayments. You can read the first here - Financing College Education and Repaying Student Loans - Part I.
Academic Scholarship Grant Continued
Once you have been awarded this type of scholarship grant, the college will be requiring you to keep up maximum rating. If this is not achieved by the end of the term, probationary status will be given to you until the grades have reached the required level. If this is not achieved, this kind of scholarship grant will be revoked.
Athletic Scholarship Grant
There are also scholarship grants awarded to athletes who have performed well in their sport. This kind of scholarship grant is a type of scholarship that many students apply for. This is because athletic scholarship grant doesn’t necessarily require you to achieve high academic grades. You only have to excel in your sport in order to get discovered by a scout and put you in a scholarship.
Departmental Awards
This type of grant is provided to students who have excelled in a particular department. The departmental grants are given to students in order to keep the students in that particular department.
Loans And Financial Aid : After College: Loan Consolidation
It is not uncommon for a borrower to get a fixed interest rate that is up to 0.6% lower than their current rates. According to federal regulations, calculating the interest rate on a consolidated loan disbursed on or after July 1, 1994 involves the weighted average of the interest rates of the older school loans you are consolidating under the new one, rounded up to the nearest one-eight of one percent. Fixed interest rates on a consolidated loan cannot exceed 8.25 percent.
Every July 1, the interest rates on federal student loans are subject to change according to the annual fluctuations of short-term federal securities, and with them your monthly payment. One of the benefits of a loan consolidation is that the interest rate is locked in for the length of the loan. While interest rates may be lower some years, when you are locked into an interest rate at least your payments will be predicable and will not rise in the years when the interest rates do.
A loan consolidation also offers the opportunity to increase the length of the loan. The longer you have to pay it off, the smaller the monthly payments will be. Remember though, lengthening the life of your loan may mean paying out a larger total amount over time.
Applying on-line for a loan consolidation is usually free, there are no fees, and there are no credit checks. A few minutes of your time can get you smaller monthly payments and better credit scores; when your loan pays off your old student loans, your credit report reflects those paid off debts.
The Standard Repayment Plan offers fixed monthly payments, but the life of the loan is limited to 10 years. The Extended Repayment Plan also offers fixed monthly payments, but spreads them over 12 to 30 years, depending on the total amount borrowed, which lowers the amount of the monthly payments. The Graduated Repayment Plan also spreads payments over 12 to 30 years, but the monthly payments increase every two years.
The Income Contingent sets a payment plan that is calculated on your annual gross income, family size, and total consolidated loan debt, figured into a period of 25 years to pay it off.