Before the June deadline I consolidated both my fiance and my own student loans so lock in the lower interest rates before they rose. I went through 2 different lenders for different reasons, each with their own benefits package which I believe to be the best available. It’s now been a few months and everything has transferred over so I thought I would share my experiences with the process.

The lending rate is set across all lenders, so pretty much the only difference is what benefits they offer. I originally planned on consolidating at UHEAA who were offering 1.25% off for direct debit and an additional 1% after 24 ontime payments for a total of 2.25% reduction. Unfortunately in May they changed the rules to only allow those with a Utah connection to join, and then dropped the benefits as well.

So then I had to shop around for other lenders. The general consensus was that the next best benefit package was from ELC (Educational Loan Company). They offer a .5% direct debit and then 1.25% after 24 ontime payments for a total 1.75% reduction. I deicide to use them for my fiances student loan consolidation which turned into a long and grueling process (I won’t get into the process of pulling the double switch from Sallie May to Direct Loans to avoid the single lender rule since that no longer exists). We had to follow up constantly on the progress as the loans needed to be disbursed before the June 30th deadline. With the deadline fast approaching and no progress made they finally indicated that since we had everything in and they were the bottleneck they would lock in the current rate even though it was not going to be disbursed in time. After many more calls they finally disbursed the loan in mid August (almost 3 months after the original application was put in).

Since I had less than $20,000 in loans I was not eligible for consolidation at ELC. After weighing all the options I decided to go with The Loanster. They offer an immediate 1.50% reduction for auto debit and just making payments ontime which differs from almost all other programs who make you make 2 to 3 years worth of payments before giving you the larger discount. They also consolidated my sub $5000 remaining balance on my student loan which almost all other lenders wouldn’t touch. I had a very good experience with them, the start to end process only took about 3 weeks from my application being sent to everything being paid off. No issues whatsoever.

At the time of this writing in my opinion these are still the 2 best offers out there depending on your situation.

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