Student Loan Consolidation: Financial Aid Benefits

Since a student consolidation loan will most likely actually cost you MORE money in the end (due to extra interest accumulation), you are probably asking yourself, “Why on Earth is student loan consolidation considered to be a form of financial aid and why is it on this website for affording college??”

Well, if you think about it, while a student consolidation loan might not specifically be giving you extra grant money or loans to pay for college (since you have already gotten those; this consolidation loan just makes a new loan out of your old ones), it will help you/your parents in affording college in that it will free up more of your money and simply make affording college less of a burden.

In general, you could probably see financial aid a way to make paying for college easier for most; many of us could afford our college education without help (depending on the school), but financial aid eases the burdens of the costs and allows us to stress less in paying our tuition. Furthermore, it frees up our money for other possible expenses, as well as for our next years in college if we don’t get as much financial aid.

Whether it is during or after college that we are making our payments, consolidating student loans will ease the stress of affording the costs, spreading them out over a much longer period of time. This financial aid option will mean that we will have more money at the present to spare for other costs, whether it is something like living expenses, or funding further education in graduate school.

By consolidating student loans, a parent could have more money at the present to help pay for
any other children they may have that are soon going to college.

In addition to covering living expenses, a student consolidating their loans could use the extra money for possibilities such as graduate school, funding their own research, or some other academic/personal endeavor that interests them.

In the end they will pay the same amount, but student loan consolidation allows one to have more money at the present, and just pay more in the long run. Overall, in the end it will make affording college less of a burden, spreading it out over time.