You no longer should think about whether you borrowed too much, or if you should have rejected the part of your student loan you used for spring break. Your new focus is on making small changes to pay off your loans faster without impacting your life. The first step on this path is looking up the specifics of all your federal loans in the National Student Loan Data System.
Facing Your Student Debt Demons
Where do you begin when it comes to dealing with your debt? Figure out what your starting point is by taking the following pop quiz to find out how much you really know about your student loans. If you don’t know some of the answers, don’t worry. This quiz comes with instructions for creating a kind of “cheat sheet” for getting the details on your loans.
1. How many different federal student loans do you have? _____
(You could have two or more per semester you were in school, and don’t forget loans for graduate school or for any community college or summer courses at other universities.)
2. Are they all consolidated into one loan? ___ yes ___ no
3. How many are subsidized? _____
4. How many are unsubsidized? _____
5. Who are the servicers on each student loan? (Use an additional sheet of paper if you have more servicers than can fit in the spaces provided.)
_________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________
6. Do you have the contact information in a file? ___ yes ___ no
7. Do you know where the file is? ___ yes ___ no
8. Do you know your interest rates on every single loan?
___ yes ___ no
9. If you put one loan in forbearance or deferment—temporary hold on making payments—did you remember to hold others?
___ yes ___ no
How did you do? If you didn’t know all the answers, you are not alone. Whether you just graduated from college or you’ve been out of school for a decade, it’s not always easy to keep tabs on eight semesters of loans—or more if you went to grad school or took five or six years to graduate—when each could be with a separate servicer. Luckily, the federal government offers a free Web site (www.nslds.ed.gov) where you can locate all of your federal loans, what servicer they are with, and the details of how much you owe. By accessing this information you can build a kind of cheat sheet to help keep track of your loans.
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