Student loans: 5 steps to pay down your debt

Student loans aren't far from your mind if you've graduated. Now comes the hard part: paying for the education that you’ve just completed. Where to begin? Collect all your loan paperwork and then follow these five smart steps to paying off your student loans.

3. Weigh consolidation

Andrew Burton/Reuters/File
Occupy Wall Street demonstrators protest against the rising national student debt in Union Square, in New York in this April 2012 file photo. Consolidating outstanding loans can make repayment easier, but you can't lump public and private loans together.

Loan consolidation can make repayment easier: You have a single loan to repay vs. many. Your interest rate will be a weighted average rate of the loans you are consolidating. But students beware; you cannot consolidate federal loan debt and private loan debt. And if there’s a chance you’ll work in a field where loan forgiveness is possible, those loans eligible for forgiveness shouldn’t be part of your consolidation options.

Say, for example, you took out a Perkins loan that is eligible for forgiveness. If you consolidate that Perkins loan (federal) with your Stafford or direct loans, you lose your ability to have the loan forgiven. It is no longer a Perkins loan.

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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