Consolidating student loans so that you get the cheapest deal possible is all about good timing. Perform this simple application and process during the right period of time during the year and you can save yourself hundreds or even thousands of dollars annually.

The best time to start preparing for a student loan consolidation application is just before graduation in the Spring. That way you are prepared to make a plan for how you will be paying the loan off when summer rolls around. 

You can’t consolidate the loan while you are still in school however if you apply in March or so you will also beat the rush of applicants that flood into debt consolidation firms looking for some way to bring all four years of school loans together.  The reason there is such a rush at this time is because federal law stipulates that you cannot consolidate your federal loans until all of the money has been disbursed to the student. These are payments that are not usually accomplished in full until the school year is over.

Yet another reason to get a head start on this matter is that interest rates have a habit of rising sometimes in the summer. This may be very well a response to the increase in requests for student consolidation loans as a lower interest rate is usually a side effect of these applications.  In fact interest rates on student loan consolidations have been known to rise considerably in the few days after graduation and before July 1st of the year to offset the automatic discounts on interest give by loan companies. Still you don’t want to wait as the sooner you consolidate the student loan the less money you will be paying on it over the long term.

Starting early in the year when shopping for a student loan consolidation deal is also a good idea because it gives you time to do some comparison, get your questions answers and get a good solid quote for your monthly payment. It also gives you time to figure out a budget for paying the loan back and also determine the length of the loan.

Yet another thing to keep in mind is that if you an consolidate your student loans during that grace period after graduation where you do not have to pay (which is a period of six months) you can manage to lock yourself into a much lower interest rate then if you wait for your loans to go into repayment. If you do so it does not mean that you need to make the payments right away. Upon applying for the student consolidation loan you will be given the option of making the first lower consolidated payment at the end of the grace period.  The student loan consolidation lender that you have chosen will be in on that agreement and be ready for that first payment that was agreed to long before the grace period was over.  It is simply a better way to prepare financially for the future.