Student Loan Repayment
My name is Gretchen Ryan and I’m an associate director in the Office of Financial Aid and Student Employment.
I recently worked on a presentation about repaying student loans. In the financial aid office, we know about various features of loans such as interest rates, origination fees, and grace periods, but we aren’t the office that collects loan repayments. As I researched for this presentation, I was impressed by the amount of helpful details about federal student loan repayment on the Department of Education website, https://studentaid.ed.gov/repay-loans.
A few takeaways from this website and my session include:
- Don’t take more loan than you need to meet your essential educational and personal expenses. Remember that you will need to repay loan that you take today plus any interest that accrues on that loan!
- Know your loans – the amounts and types of debt that you have, the interest rate(s), and the servicer(s).
- Federal loans offer a variety of repayment plans. Research the repayment plan that will truly be best for you. Create a monthly budget in order to help you determine your repayment plan, if you don’t have one already.
- Use online calculators to help you have a sense of your monthly payments well before you enter repayment, and preferably as you make your way through your educational program. The above website has a good calculator, as does http://www.finaid.org and http://www.fastweb.com.
- Utilize your loan servicer staff, your financial aid office, and your bursar collections office to help answer any questions that you have.