Financial Aid

I was on my evening girlfriend walk the other day and one of the girls that I walk with started asking me a bunch of questions about her and her husband's student loans. It occurred to me then that there might be others who would benefit from this information as well since there have been a lot of changes in the last few years.

My name is Adriana. I have been working in financial aid for just over 8 years. My husband is just finishing his third year of residency in OB/GYN. We have three kids Emily (5), Palmer (3), and Logan (3 months). After Logan was born I cut my hours back to part time and I now work from home. Things are crazy at our house but we wouldn't have them any other way. I started blogging about three years ago when Bret started residency. We relocated from KS where we had both grown up and all of our family lived to PA where we knew no one. Needless to say it was a really rough first year but has gotten much better. My blog FromKStoPA is private but I am happy to invite anyone who is interested to have access just send me an email.

Financial aid is a really big topic even when you narrow it down to things we as wives would need to know (like deferment, repayment, consolidation, etc). Sometimes when I give presentations I would get the glossy eye way over the head look from people. I realized a long time ago that it helps to break it down into smaller topics in more than one post. Also feel free to post questions or other topics too. If I don't know the answer I can probably find it out or at least point you in the right direction.

Like most students, taking out student loans is a very buy now pay later mindset. We borrow because we need the money now and we have this assurance that "someday" we will have a good job and will be able to pay those loans back. Most of us try to hold off on making any payments as long as possible. In fact most students that I see (and most of my husband's colleagues) have only a general idea of how much they have actually borrowed, what the interest rates are, and or how much their monthly payments will be. Realizing that most them have borrowed for at least 8 years (assuming 4 years undergrad and 4 years med school) we sometimes lose track.

The first step is to figure out how much you owe, who you owe to, and what your interest rates are. One of the best places to do this is at the National Student Loan Data system www.nslds.ed.gov To have access to this information you will need to have the borrower's PIN which can be found at www.pin.ed.gov

This website keeps track of all of the student's Stafford loans. Each individual loan is listed with the amount, date taken, outstanding principle, and outstanding interest. If you have consolidated the loan it will also list the consolidated loan total as well. You can find information on who the lender is and their contact information.

Because of the costs of going to school are so high most students have borrowed more than just Stafford loans. Other types of loans include Perkins and private loans. To find these totals you have to do more leg work. To find out your Perkins total you should contact the school attended. Be sure to contact all schools attended including undergrad. Most schools use University Accounting Service as the collector for repayment. You could also contact them for initial information.

For private loans the easiest way to find all of them at once is to run your credit report. You can run this for free three times a year. Although this doesn't give you your credit score you can get contact information for each of the private loans held. Even if you are pretty sure that you know all of the loans and their contact information it is a good idea to double check. It is the small loans that you forget about that can turn into a real pain in your side.

Once you have a good list (or in our case a spreadsheet lol) of all of your student loans you want to make sure that each lender has accurate contact information. My husband is really bad about keeping track of anything bill wise. We have an email address set up that we both have access to so that I can help keep track of things like student loan notices.

Keeping track of all of the loans is half the battle. The second half of the battle is repayment (or keeping from having to pay them until residency is over). In my next post I will talk about deferment, forbearance, economic hardship, minimal income repayment, consolidation, and repayment options. I am happy to cover other topics that there might be questions about. I wasn't sure where to start and what all to cover. Like I said at the beginning financial aid is such a huge topic that it is hard to know what everyone already knows/understands and what there are questions about. Other topics I feel confident discussing is residency/relocation loans, medical school private loans, and repayment strategies. Something that we are currently working through personally is contract negotiations with the inclusion of student loan relief and medical underserved area loan forgiveness programs. I hope that this information helps!