General Advice

[lionsfan20]

Reading these forums , it kind of worries me how many people are in student loan troubles. I just graduated with about 50k in debt and it kind of worries me it could happen to me. Just looking for any advice to avoid the problems most of you guys are going through.

ALso , I would like to know how many of the problems are from people who actually graduated.

[SCF]

Single best piece of advice?  Stay on top of your loans and be pro-active.  That means that if you move, reach out to your lender and ensure you continue to get statements and important notices (or check their website regularly to make sure your payments are being applied properly and everything else looks OK).  If you can't pay, contact them BEFORE you're late, so you can explore options to reduce your payments or delay them.

Other than that, do whatever you can to avoid a late payment, and prioritize getting yourself out of debt.  Student loans may not be the first thing on your list, but you should have a plan to get them paid off successfully. 

Sometimes things happen beyond your control, not everyone who defaults could have prevented it, but often, being on top of things with your lender helps out immensely, even if it doesn't totally prevent the default.

[bahbahd]

1. Visit the National Student Loan Data System for Students   http://www.nslds.ed.gov/   Check here often to see which agency is servicing _each_  of your loans. (Edit: This site will not list any private loans you may have. )
2. Log into all of your loan servicing agency's websites on a monthly basis.
3. Always keep your contact information current.
4. If you are offered, sign up for Auto-Debit, Quick Pay or whatever there is to get 0.25% or more interest rate reduction. 
5. Always verify each payment was received and applied your loans. (Meaning - don't just look for the debit against your bank account and assume all is well. Check #2. )
6. Once your loans are paid off, manually cancel any automatic payments you have set up.
7. If you ever need to postpone repayment with deferment or forbearance, keep checking on loan status monthly and make any/all payments until you can verify with the servicing agency and NSLDS that __all__ of your loans are in the right status.
8. Keep copies of all communications: statements, loan summaries, offers. Send in any forms via certified mail and keep all the return receipts. 

Doing all the above might sound crazy overboard; it is not.  People generally have student loan and associated credit issues because they don't keep a close enough watch.

• Loans can be sold and/or loans can transfer to a new servicing agent.
• Loans can be spread out over multiple servicing agents even though it was just one degree you earned.
• Payments may not be applied correctly; Agent took the money from the bank, but it is not showing as a payment on your loans.
• Borrower thinks all loans are in forbearance but somehow "this  one loan" was not included and goes delenquent.

Best advice: Pay the monthly payment with any automatic method provided, and then (if you have money left over after saving some) make an extra payment immediately following for the same amount as your monthly payment and designate this payment to be applied towards the principle. 

[InvincibleSummer3]

Having worked in higher education previously, I think there's also something to be said for planning your career path. I know dozens of people who took out the maximum in loans every semester, often working toward degrees that were unlikely to support paying them back. I would never tell anyone not to go to college, but be smart about it. If I had it to do over, I'd have attended a lower-cost college my first two years, rather than jumping for the prestige school. And I would have at least considered a career in different fields, instead of sticking to the humanities.

But in the end, none of that was as detrimental to my student loans as my child's major illness. That was the reason I defaulted. Life sometimes comes at you in ways you don't anticipate.