Credit Management - Student Loan Consolidation

One of the most important elements in managing your credit is managing long term debt such as student loans or a second mortgage on your home. In my own case I have to be upfront, I did a very poor job of managing my student loans post graduation. One of the problems was the multiplicity of loans that took in my last two years of college. This meant that I often missed payments and in case of one loan, managed to completely drop the ball on it completely. I would have certainly benefited from student loan consolidation. This would have given me a single payment and single place to right a check. Consolidation would have also lowered my over all interest rate for the loans I had. The interesting thing of course was that this was well before the internet and before federal student loan consolidation was a common practice. Getting student loans consolidated back then was a time consuming process requiring multiple physical forms. Simply put it was really hard to do. This was too bad since this meant that I damaged my credit and made it harder to purchase my first home in California. By
consolidating my student loan debt I could have saved on the interest rate and my downpayment. As it was I bought my first California home with a 20% down payment.

Had I managed my student loan debt better I would have been able to purchase even earlier and would have enjoyed an even greater appreciation in my home's value. So to manage your credit, you should do the following.

• Consolidate your student loan debt into a single payment
  This will make it easy to track and manage your student loans. Having multiple loans with multiple vendors is the surest way to miss a payment.
  
• Set up an auto pay
  By autopaying the minimums+$1 on your student loan, you don't have to worry about the mail time or other inconvienences. By making the minimums+$1 you will show a payment history of paying more than the minimum and this will help with your credit. Additionally it will mean that you don't have to worry about the fiddle faddle associated with the mail.
  

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