Now where oh where are your student loans now?
By: Genevieve Dobson
Do you remember when you filled out that student loan application with your school? Yeah, Probably not. Let me refresh your memory. When you took out your student loans you would have first completed a FAFSA form and been assigned a lender. If you went to school recently all loans are disbursed through the Department of Education (Direct Loans). Now even if your loans are with Direct Loans they would have hired a Servicer to manage your account. You would have received a letter and or an email from your Servicer announcing their presence and their role in your student loan process (Disclosure Statement). This document is important to have and keep for your records. However that may have been years ago and you may have been assigned numerous Servicer’s which can be quite confusing.
For your federal loans your in luck because the government houses all of your federal loan and grant information in one place so you can find your loan Servicer information easily. It also provides your balances, interest rates and accrued interest amounts among other details. You can view your loan information at www.nslds.ed.gov.
Please check out my latest video that discusses Mistake #2 so that you can avoid yet another fallacy with regards to handling your student loan debt: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LBB688e3DJg.
Make sure you know where your student loans are so you don’t become delinquent and not even realize it. Many times you may move after graduating and if you don’t update your Servicer with your new address you may never get your bills and therefore become delinquent unnecessarily.
Just like I discussed in Mistake #1 your loans wont just disappear and now we realize how important it is to make sure you know where your loans are. Next we will talk about the 3rd Mistake so you can avoid this one as well. Make sure to subscribe to my Blogs so you don’t miss the next mistake. You can also check out my website at www.degreesofsuccessinfo.com for more information about how I can assist you in avoiding mistakes on your account.
Anna,We were recently deenid the DOJ loan mod/principal reduction because our loan is affordable the only thing I can guess is that our payment is not more than 31% of our gross income. However, they are using last year’s tax return, which includes bonuses, which we do not anticipate to be the same. We don’t know for sure how they are calculating our income since they did not provide that info in the denial letter. Under the new Hamp 2 program, your DTI only has to fall in the 25%-40% range. We are at 23% based on last year’s tax returns, but as I said,we do not want to include bonuses because those were based on last year and this year is expected to be significantly less. Do you know if there is a way to exclude bonuses from income or adjust them to be more reasonable other than using last year’s tax return or W-2? We are literally one or two percent from qualifying and would be well in the range if we did not have to include last year’s bonus income, but project more reasonably based on year to date income as to this year’s bonuses. So incredibly frustrated with the process any advice greatly appreciated. Thank you.