Refinancing your student loans is a great way to help you budget. Finances can be complicated when you first get out of school. Having a single payment, instead of multiple ones, can help a lot. If you got different loans throughout your years in school, they probably are all for different amounts and have different interest rates. Interest rates are low right now, and consolidating all of your loans together usually gets you a better rate. A low interest rate is the best thing to look for when thinking of taking out a new loan.

Interest rates change daily and are person-specific, but Cedar Education Lending has posted rates of LIBOR+4.25% to LIBOR+6.75%. The London InterBank Offered Rate (LIBOR) is the bank’s estimated borrowing rate. It changes daily but is approximately 0.25% for 3 months. You can check out the LIBOR rates at: LIBOR rates USD There are ten different currencies which have their borrowing rates affected by it, and you can see them and compare them all at that site. It is a good thing to know what all the numbers and acronyms mean when you are dealing with lenders.

Cedar Education Lending Company

Cedar Education Lending Company

Cedar Education Lending has most of the same requirements as all private lenders:

  • You have to have graduated from an eligible school.

  • You must have an income of $2,000 a month and an annual income greater than the requested loan amount. Your co-signer can contribute to meeting this requirement.

  • You can only consolidate private loans through a private lender. Federal loans must be consolidated separately.

You can apply right online, but the application is first for eligibility. Cedar Education Lending is affiliated with CUStudentLoans, so you will be directed to that site for the calculators and applications.

Cedar Education Lending has a Blog where you can find some useful information, such as “6 Tips on How to Consolidate Private Loans”. The advice is to consider whether it is beneficial to consolidate or not. Consolidation is not always the best answer. If you have various loans, some with high interest rates and some with low ones, it might be best to work hard to pay off the high interest loans and then ride it out with the low interest ones. Sometimes that can be more motivating than consolidating for an average rate and then living with all of your debt for up to 15 years. Another good article here: https://www.paymystudentloans.com/cedar-education-consolidation-review-body/

Also, do some research and know what you are expecting and if that is what you will get. If you have a total loan amount of less than $7,500, then it is not worth consolidating, and no lender will likely even bother doing it. Make sure you are familiar with the terms used on loan applications, so that you are not signing into something you do not understand. A 15 year term is a long time; make sure you can live that long with whatever you get.

Having a credit-worthy co-signer is the best way to improve your chances of approval and a low interest rate. Cedar Education Lending allows the co-signer to be released from the agreement after 12 months of prompt, full (interest + principal) payments. Knowing the ways a co-signer can get out of the loan is another thing to look into. Few people think of what would happen to the co-signer if something happened to them. You are young, fresh out of school, and have your whole life ahead of you… but accidents happen. Make sure you know all the ins and outs of the agreement you are asking your co-signer to sign on to.