Nelnet is a Great Place to Go for School Loans
I have found the best luck with using Nelnet. They have excellent customer service and they are so easy to work with. For the most part they do all of the work for you. I had multiple loans to consolidate, as in they were all over the place. Nelnet figured out where they were and consolidated them for me. Most of the paperwork was done on their end, as I was able to submit most of my information online.
The nice thing about having all of your loans in one place is that they can usually combine them into a total sum and when the interest rates are low enough you may be able to lock in a substantially lower rate. I will tell you that as with any situation there is give and take. I did spend approximately an hour on the phone to get everything handled. I am sure I could have been off sooner but I actually enjoyed the conversation I was having with the lady.
Let me tell you about some of the options they offer. Depending on the size of your loans you may be able to receive up to 30 years to repay your loans. While that is not going to work for a 10,000 dollar loan it will work for a substantial amount such as 80-140,000 dollars in debt. Not only that but they give you even more options. Believe it or not they are simple enough to understand and these people are here in the United States. So you don’t have to worry about problems with not understanding them.
Some of the options are the graduated payment plan. This is a great payment plan if you know that over time you will be making more money. You start at a set rate and every two years the monthly payment increases. So gradually over time you pay more and the payment maximizes at a certain point. It would be different for each person, but I believe the average would be approximately 1% of the loan but don’t quote me on that. Every situation is different and the nice people at Nelnet would be the ones to tell you much better than I can.
They also offer the option that once there is a history of 36 consecutive payments on time they will drop your interest rate by 1.25%. This could be a substantial amount of money over the life of your loan. They told me that by going with this option I would save about $7800.00 dollars. Another option that they have is for those of you who will be lucky enough to pay your loans off in 7 years or less. This option will actually work similar to the last option in the way that you must have 36 payments on time, consecutively, and they will do a 1 time balance reduction which may save you 1200.00 dollars or more off the total balance.
I have been in school for a long time and I have been through a lot of lenders. You wont be disappointed, they work with you and make things work!
If nothing else it doesn’t hurt to talk to them, they are friendly and not to forget that they have round the clock customer service!
If you are interested in contacting Nelnet here is the information”
Visit them online at Nelnet.com
Or
Call them at:
Customer Contact Center 1.888.486.4722
