It is quite difficult for graduates to find easily and immediately a job to be able to cover their daily expenses and pay back the loans for their recently graduated studies. Most lenders offer a period of grace for six month after graduation, but sometimes it may take more than a year for a graduate to find a decent job. Even if they do find such a job, they discover that as a beginner they are underemployed, work part-time or even have a temporary employment with no perspectives. So, after the six month period of grace the re-payment is supposed to begin, and they need help if they are in the impossibility to cover all their expenses, including the loans.

Strategies for the New College Graduates

Student loans repayment can be a real nightmare without adopting some strategies that would help the new graduates to organize their social and financial life. Here are some strategies they can use to do this:

-An additional part-time job;

-Freelancing is another options (meaning that they can do particular pieces of work for different organisations, without working all the time for a single organisation);

-They should try to keep their living expenses as low as possible (live in a smaller apartment, live with a roommate to share some of the expenses, find an apartment that is closer to the job, to eliminate the extra-expenses for transport etc.);

-To apply for forbearance (this is an immediate solution for hard times when the new graduate is in impossibility to re-pay the loans; it is a temporary period, when the graduate can postpone or delay his or her re-payments until a later time on a federal or direct loan after the beginning of the re-payment, and when the student doesn't qualify for deferral). The forbearance must be applied through the lenders of the loans.

-To consolidate the payments.

The Consolidation

If the payments are not consolidated, each loan is paid, billed and taken into account separately. The student receives payment slips for each loan. There is a lot of paperwork to be done. You can imagine that there could be even, let's say, ten loans to be accounted and billed each of them separately. If you add the payment for each individual loan, you can get to a total of $500 or $1000 per month. The total can be even more, depending on the total amount borrowed from the lenders, and also depending on the rate of interest perceived for each loan. It's not easy to cover all these and support the expenses of your daily living.

That is why the consolidation of all loans is the solution accepted by the banks and extremely supportive for those who have such hard times when after graduation they have to return large amounts of money to the lenders.

Consolidation means joining together, it is a process which combines al the loans of a student or graduate into only one loan. Through this a student's monthly payment is reduced very much to a decent amount that could be paid easier. The risk is lower for both the students and the lenders. This sum can be estimated to about $250 even $100 in a monthly bill. Again, the total sum to be paid monthly depends on the amount borrowed, the interest rate and how has the loan been consolidated.