Student loan consolidation refers to wrapping all your student loans into a single loan with one lender and one repayment plan. You can plan to consolidate your loan like refinancing a home mortgage. The time you consolidate your loan, the balances of your other current loans are paid off, with the total balance playing over into one consolidated loan.
Here are the top 5 benefits of student loan consolidation:
1. Lower monthly payments
By consolidating all your student loans into one loan, you only need to pay off one loan monthly instead of several student loans monthly. Thus, your monthly payment is lower.
2. Pay only one loan monthly instead of several student loans monthly
It is a lot easier if you have to manage only one student loan instead of several student loans with different payment deadlines. Also, sometimes with many student loans, you may end up forgetting to pay one student loan.
3. Low, fixed interest rate
By consolidating your student loans, you will be able to take advantages of low, fixed interest rates
4. No credit check or processing fees
No credit check is required during the application of a student loan consolidation. The payment plans and terms are usually quite flexible in that they can customize it according to your financial standing.
5. Make monthly student loan payment electronically
While it is not necessary to make payment electronically, using direct debit from your bank account will prevent you from forgetting to make a payment. (Fort Lauderdale, FL 2/08/2008 01:19 AM GMT (TransWorldNews)
Applying for an individual student loan can lower the interest rate because places offer incentives to use them for the loan. Some companies offer a lower rate for having the monthly payment automatically deducted from your account. There is also a benefit by making so many consecutive payments, on time, and that showing will lower the interest rate. This of course will make your payoff amount decrease since more money will go to the principle instead of interest.

Having a single student loan can help your credit rating because of how your credit score is figured. Part of the score is made up of how many outstanding debts you have as well as the total amount due to each. Getting a student consolidation loan will give you a higher loan amount due but only for one loan and not the several others that you currently may have.
Thus, your score will go up and even get better as you pay off that loan. It will not be an instantaneous fix as credit companies can take up to six months to report a drop of a loan off your report. But if you don’t use your credit unwisely in this time period your score will raise and when you do apply for something at later time you can possibly get a lower interest rate for that loan as well. Which will have you making lower payments on that item and help you pay off that loan faster too? (Darnell Scott:
Fort Lauderdale, FL (PRWeb) January 25, 2007 — By utilizing the most secure online school loan consolidation system, Student Financial Advisors is able to offer up to 1.85% off of the student’s effective interest rate for Federal student loan consolidation.
“We are utilizing technology to securely streamline the process of consolidating student loans, but at the same time we are using that technology to help people understand the entire student loan consolidation process,” Peter Restivo, Vice President of Marketing said.
The rate discount breaks down like this; first of all by consolidating while still in their grace period, students can receive a .60% rate discount. Next, Student Financial Advisors offers .25% off of the effective interest rate for students who sign up for automatic check withdrawal. Lastly, after only 36 on time payments, Student Financial Advisors will take an additional 1.00% off of the effective interest rate, for a total of a 1.85% rate reduction.
“We here at Student Financial Advisors have created the Student Loan Consolidation Information Center to help people find the answers to all of their questions pertaining to the consolidation of federal student loans,” said Peter Restivo, Vice President of Customer Relations.

Before applying for any student loan consolidation, a student has to do some research in determining which student consolidation loan is suitable for him/her.
Here are some pointers which you can take into consideration before taking out a student loan consolidation:
1. Credit Rating
It is important to know your credit score since it is a major factor in determining whether you get the student consolidation loan. If your rating is over 660, then you should not have any problems getting a loan. If however your credit rating is less than 600, you might want to evaluate ways to improve your credit score first.
Your credit rating will also determine the interest rate you have to pay for your consolidation loan. The higher the credit score, the lower the interest rate.
2. Interest Rate
Even though you can get lower interest rate with a student consolidation loan, the repayment period is usually longer. In the long run, you actually pay more for your loans. My advise would be to research for lenders who can allow you to upgrade your payment when you can afford it. For example, you may not be able to repay much when you are still a student, but once you have a job and have a regular income, it will be best to clear the loan as soon as possible.
3. Income minus Expenses
You need to evaluate your current income minus your expenses to determine your net income surplus each month. Analysis your expenses to see if you can reduce or eliminate any. (Ricky Lim: about-studentloan.com)
Summary:
Before you make decision to use student loan consolidation, you should evaluate what we’ll get, interest rate, credit rating etc. After you gets information thus you make a decision how you’ll consolidate your student debt loan on line or off line.