Are you about to graduate from college with a few student loans on your shoulders waiting to be paid? Consolidating your student loans might make your life a little easier.

Let’s say you’ve taken out a couple federal loans. By consolidating your loans, you are essentially combining all three student loans into one. Not only is this easier for you to keep track of everything, there are also many other advantages to loan consolidation.

One is that you might get a much lower interest rate than the combined interest rate of all your loans put together right now. You also have the option of extending the period of time up to 30 years in which you repay your loan. This allows you to have a more convenient, lower monthly payments, which will increase the chance of you being able to make that payment every month. Some more advantages? There is no fee for consolidating your federal loans and lenders won’t do a credit check on you when you apply. You could actually improve your credit by making your monthly payments on time.

There are some down sides to loan consolidation though. Most lenders will advise that you not combine federal and private loans together. This is because it would be consolidated into a new private loan, and you would then be losing many of the benefits of federal loans such as loan deferment. Loan deferment allows you to put off paying loans in case you decide to go to graduate school after undergrad. Also, if you’ve chosen to extend your loan payments on a very large loan, you might end up paying more interest than you would have if on your original loan term. Finally, you might not always be able to negotiate a better rate.

Ultimately, loan consolidation is supposed to save you money. Usually, you are only allowed to consolidate your loans once, so make sure you do your homework.

Do you have any more questions about student loan consolidation? See if our student loan consolidation guide can help.