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Archive for the 'Loans' Category

To Consolidate or not to Consolidate

Written by admin on Tuesday, November 4th, 2008 in Loans.

As Hamlet would say, “that is the question”. The real question about whether you should consolidate your student loans or not is a very important question and the main reason as to why it is so important is because most of the people that deal with student loans do not actually realize that there is a controversy of any kind here. Most of the people think that consolidation is good all of the time and that is all there is to say on the topic. People that have dealt with student loan consolidation problems before however understand that things are quite a bit different in the real world and that there are things you need to watch out for, even with a particularly safe tactic such as the consolidation of student loans.

One thing that you need to watch out for is amortization. If the amortization of a particular consolidation deal is done in a particular way, you could end up paying more interest over the long term even though you ended up cutting down on your current monthly payments. This is what a refinance does, but a consolidation is supposed to save you money over the short and long terms. For this reason, you should be very wary of any type of loan consolidation that has this particular aspect as it is usually put forward by a bank that is trying to make some extra money off you.

The point of this article was not to make you afraid of loan consolidation, but rather to make you cautious. Too much of even a good thing can be bad and the point above about amortization shows that perfectly in the case of student credit and loan consolidation. As long as you are cautious and understand the deal before you sign it however, you should not have these types of problems.