A student who dreams to become a doctor or an anthropologist is aware that he or she will have to invest several years into studies to get the desired career. The education for this will obviously require financing. By all means your parents will help you in funding your education, but they may not be in a position to arrange all the money for your higher studies. You will eventually need an alternative to meet your educational expenses. Even if you qualify for scholarships, you may still have to apply for a student loan.
Student loans can be availed from all banks at equitable rates. But banks don’t offer loans to students as their corporate social responsibility. They do so because they sense an opportunity of assisting a prospective high earner from whom they can profit in the future during the process of loan repayment. It’s driven by pure commercial interest and banks offer smart proposals to attract their prospective customers.
The first criterion that should be considered while analyzing a student loan is obviously the interest rate that you have to pay. The other considerations are the preconditions for the loan and the terms of repayment. A student can choose between a subsidized or unsubsidized student loan. The difference is that in case of subsidized student loan, you don’t have to pay any interest during your study period. Any interest accruing during this period is paid by the government.
An unsubsidized student loan requires the student to pay the interest during the study period. If you are worried about your credit worthiness, then you can always go for bad credit student loan. These are loans that require no credit check. So you wouldn’t have to worry about being declined a student loan due to a bad credit history. For the subsidized loans, the repayment period begins only after the student finishes his graduation from the college.
Some loans though allow anywhere between two to six months to start the repaying process. This is to give the students enough time to start earning after the successful completion of their course and repay the loan from their salary. The cheapest loans are the direct student loans that get paid to the institutes directly. If any student takes two to three loans to fund his education, then he has the option of consolidating all his loans and paying a fixed recalculated interest rate.
To avoid any nasty surprises towards the end of your course, it’s mandatory to read the terms and conditions in great detail during selection of the student loan. If you have any doubts or queries, then feel free to ask questions before diving into it. Your main objective is the smooth completion of your course and you should take all measures necessary to make the funding of your education a stress-free process.
