If you haven’t paid a nickel on that loan by January 2010, you will have accrued $1,156 in interest, bringing your total owed to $4,556. From the NSLDS home page, click on Financial Aid Review. Accept the terms and enter your Social Security number, the first two letters of your last name during college, your date of birth, and your PIN. The first page you will see is a chart displaying a list of your loans with Type of Loan, Loan Amount, Loan Date, Disbursed Amount, Canceled Amount, Outstanding Principal, and Outstanding Interest.
What do all these terms mean and how is this chart going to help you manage your loans? The chart on the student loan data system Web site will give you all the information you need to find your student loans and information about them. However, if the chart just looks like a bunch of gibberish with the dozens of terms you need to know, you won’t get much out of it. So let’s look first at an explanation of the terms that will be most important in deciphering the information you need.
Types of Loans
The federal government categorizes your loans in several different ways:
- Consolidated: This is a combined loan from multiple semesters. For example, if you consolidated loans after you finished your undergraduate degree, you could have eight semesters of loans in one consolidation loan.
- Subsidized: With a subsidized loan, the government pays your interest while you attend college and other special circumstances.
- Unsubsidized: With an unsubsidized loan, you pay your own interest in all circumstances.
- FFEL (Federal Family Education Loan) Program: These loans are with a servicer other than the government but they are federally backed loans and qualify for most of the same repayment programs as direct loans. They can also be consolidated to direct lending.
- Direct: This kind of loan is issued directly from the government via direct lending as a servicer.
- Stafford: The most common type of federal loan, it can come in many forms, such as consolidated or unconsolidated or subsidized or unsubsidized. It can be serviced by either direct lending or another servicer.
- Perkins: This category of student loans is fairly rare and is normally reserved for low-income families. If you have these, you may have additional options for loan forgiveness.
Loans Chart Categories
Not sure what all the terms mean on your Loans chart? Use the following term list as a guideline for the categories you’ll see:
- Loan Amount: The amount you were approved to borrow for a specific semester. This amount may not have the amount you received. For instance, let’s say you were approved for $6,000, but you decided you only needed $3,500. The other $2,500 you were approved for you don’t have to pay back because you never borrowed this money.
- Loan Date: This is the date you originally took out your loan. It is helpful in deciphering in which semester you borrowed that particular amount of money. Be aware that you could have more than one loan per semester. For instance, let’s say the government gave you x amount of money in a certain semester in a subsidized loan where your interest is paid while you attend college. Then you were given an additional loan to cover the rest of your expenses in the form of an unsubsidized loan.
- Disbursed Amount: This is the original amount of money you borrowed on the specified loan date. It has nothing to do with how much you owe now, because interest has accrued and payments have been made. For example, in the fall semester of 2003, you borrowed a student loan in the amount of $3,500. After seven years of an average interest rate of 5 percent, you now owe $4,924 (figuring in compounded interest).
- Canceled Amount: If you see a canceled amount on your Loans chart, it means that amount is no longer owed. It could be for a variety of reasons: Perhaps you became disabled and could no longer make payments, you completed a loan forgiveness program, or you rejected part of the financial aid package you were rewarded. For example, I applied for financial aid in my last semester of school. However, I looked at the debt I’d already accumulated and decided I didn’t want to have $70,000 worth of student loan debt. So I arranged a payment plan with my university to pay over the course of the semester instead of taking on new debt. For that particular semester, a cancelled amount is shown on my Loans chart for the loans I turned down.
- Outstanding Principal: This is the amount of your original loan that you still owe. However, outstanding interest is added to this amount to create your total balance. For example, let’s say you consolidated all your loans into one 30-year loan of $60,000 in 2007. You’ve been making payments for two years and have an interest rate of 5 percent. You now owe $58,184. This reflects $1,816 you’ve paid toward your principal, but it doesn’t have anything to do with the $5,915 you’ve already spent in interest.
- Enrollment Status: Your enrollment status dictates whether you are a part-time student, full-time student, graduate student, or have graduated. For example: part time, full time, graduated. Although your enrollment status won’t affect anything in the Student Loan chart you will create at the end of this chapter, it could affect consolidation if you are still in school. Generally, you will wait until after graduation to consolidate your loans.
- Outstanding Interest: The outstanding interest is the interest accrued since your last student loan payment. This could be what has accrued during a period of temporary payment reprieve or since your last monthly payment,
- Repayment: When you start sending in your loans, you’ll start to hear the term repayment constantly. This just means that you are repaying your loan company for the payments you received when you were in college.
Checklist for Understanding Student Loan Terms
- Print your charts from the National Student Loan Data System.
- Go through the information in your charts and make a list of the terms you don’t know.
- Look up those terms in the Types of Loans and Loans Chart Categories lists in this chapter.
- Refer to the lists if you have questions as you get further into organizing your debt.
