I've said it before but I'll say it again. We have to be open with each other about things we all have in common to help each other out.

There are 44.2 MILLION people walking around this earth with student loan debt!!!

The newest count shows the national student loan debt total to be $1,520,000,000,000 (that's TRILLION)!!!

Anyway, my point is that pretty much all of us are dealing with the same thing so we should help each other out.

I want to be open about it and show how easy it is to consolidate and refinance your student loans so that we can fight this crippling debt as best we can.

(I'm providing a vocabulary dictionary at the bottom of this to help you understand what the heck I'm talking about.)

Let me say this first though: not everyone is in the same situation you are in. There are tons of avenues one can take for higher education, tons of different ways to pay for it whether it be grants, scholarships, cash, private or public loans. That being said, this may be different for you but this is my experience with my student loans. Do with this what you will.

I graduated from a four-year university with tens of thousands of dollars in debt. I didn't receive any government assistance (i.e. grants, FAFSA, etc.), I also worked an average of 20-25 hours per week to pay for my own expenses to lessen the amount of loans I had to take out. I had heard about refinancing and consolidation but had no idea what it was or how to do it, so I asked around and I found that not many people knew what it was, even adults who have been paying back their loans for years were unaware. I also found that everybody who did know about it had a different situation from mine so the process looked different for them.

Anyway, I did my research and found a website called Credible.com and hopped on.

I entered my information like who I was, what loans I had, proof of income and co-signer stuff. (You may not need a co-signer but I did so I'm mentioning it)

From there, Credible gave me about ten options of refinancing plans sorted by either fixed or variable interest rates, the loan term (5, 7, 10, 15, or 20 years) and monthly payment costs.

I selected which one worked best for me which lead me to a bank that was offering it.

Once again, I entered the same kind of information as I had before, signed agreements for my new loan and then that bank dispersed the amount of money I owed to the private lender (Sallie Mae, in my case) and just like that my time with Sallie was done.

I went from having five separate loans (one for each year I was in school), each with different interest rates and ridiculous monthly payments to having one loan with an interest rate that was almost cut in half from my previous rate,

and a monthly payment cost that was affordable for me.

The whole process took about three months but that's mostly because getting things approved/verified on bank time took a while but it wasn't bad.

Just to clarify, I still owe the same amount as I did before, however I will end up paying about $30,000+ less on interest with a reduced interest rate and now instead of five monthly payments I have one.

Proverbs 22:7 reads, "The borrower is SLAVE to the lender." I don't plan on being a slave to a lender a second longer than necessary.

Vocabulary

Consolidation: bringing your multiple loans down to one for convenience

Refinance: Reevaluating your loans to get a smaller interest rate/monthly payment

Fixed Interest Rate: an interest rate that remains the same regardless of how the market is (stays the same for the entirety of your loan term)

Variable Interest Rate: an interest rate that fluctuates to account for the market's status (could change higher or lower randomly throughout your loan term)