Student Loan Consolidation

You said you have two loans, one federal and the other Sallie Mae...Are you trying to consolidate them together? or do you have multiple loans through sallie mae that you're trying to consolidate? Consolidating student loans doesn't net you a better interest rate. What it does is that it lumps all your loans into one and the interest rate is the weighted average of all the loans.

I'm going to assume that the federal loan is fixed at approximate 6.8% and the sallie mae is a variable rate? That could be a reason why the sallie mae rate is lower than the federal loan.

Federal loans are better than private loans in the sense that they have multiple payment options.

Quote from vbt : You said you have two loans, one federal and the other Sallie Mae...Are you trying to consolidate them together? or do you have multiple loans through sallie mae that you're trying to consolidate? Consolidating student loans doesn't net you a better interest rate. What it does is that it lumps all your loans into one and the interest rate is the weighted average of all the loans. I'm going to assume that the federal loan is fixed at approximate 6.8% and the sallie mae is a variable rate? That could be a reason why the sallie mae rate is lower than the federal loan. Federal loans are better than private loans in the sense that they have multiple payment options.

in that sense, i mean refinance them. they're both fixed from my understanding...sallie mae at 4.75% and direct at 5.8%. i am paying aggressively into the direct loan with additional payments but it just seems weird that the gov't is charging me a higher rate than sallie mae. i'd throw out the flexible payment options for a lower rate ya know?

no no and no.

you cannot consolidate private and public loans. Unless you can find a private lender to refinance them for you, which is near impossible (or unless you can get a HELO/C or something), you are stuck. [on a side note, I essentially consolidated several of my high rate private loans under DL while in grad school by accepting more finaid than I could use, and then paying off the private loans with the $$]

no net benefit to consolidating other than having a single, rather than multiple, loan(s).

For me, I balance transferred about 20k to 0% credit cards for 12-18 months. Might want to look into that route. I admit that this is kind of risky though.