Why choose federal student loans?

By admin, February 7, 2014

Students with a financial need for managing their education would opt for a student loan and the best amongst all of them is the federal student loans. There are a lot of supporting factors for this particular loan which make it a huge success amongst students. More than 80% of the students in the country opt for a federal student loan for their education. Of this, more than 50% of the students seem to be undergraduate students. An overview of why to choose a federal student loan is explained in detail as follows.

There are different types of federal student loans offered, few of those include Perkins loans, Stafford loans, PLUS loans etc. Each and every student would be able to obtain the loan of their choice easily. Federal student loan is offered for both undergraduate and graduate students. Being eligible for a federal student loan is one of the easiest things to do since, most of the students would be eligible for the loan and there are no restrictions placed on them apart from the requirement that the borrower should be US citizen and should have no criminal record against their name.

Eligibility & Interest rate charges

Being eligible for a loan would make the job easy for the borrower since they need not worry about the complications that might occur during loan application. Application procedure is also simple and easily understandable. Coming to the most important aspect of any particular loan program, which is the interest rate charged on the loan. All the federal student loans carry lower interest rate charges. Considerably lower interest rate charges would mean that the borrower would be able to manage their repayment in a better manner.

Repayment terms

Due to lower interest rate, the amount of monthly payment that has to be made towards the loan repayment would be lower and manageable. Apart from the interest rate charged on the loan amount, federal student loans would not have any other costs associated with the loan. Subsidized Stafford loan offered to undergraduate students would help the borrower with the repayments since the interest rate charged at the time of schooling would be paid by the Federal government directly and the borrower need not pay them.

Repayment period would be initiated only after 6 months from graduation and so this would allow enough time for the borrower to secure a job and start earning money to pay for the repayments. In case of unemployment or any other financial stress situations, the borrower would be able to opt for a deferment period which would allow them to postpone their repayment period for a fixed period of time. This time period can be utilized by the borrower to recover from their bad times and gain some finances.

Suppose, in case the borrower files for a bankruptcy or forbearance, he or she would be forgiven for the amount of money they would have to make towards the loan repayment and this amount would be paid by the federal government themselves.