Consolidation loans can offer a bit of repayment relief and simplify repayment of your education loans. But they can also increase your costs and come with other pitfalls.

Questions to ask lenders before you choose to consolidate your student loans.

We can’t say this enough: Federal loans have far better interest rates and repayment terms than private loans. You should always exhaust these before turning to private loans. So why do so many people take out private loans? Well, federal loan amounts...

Let’s be very clear: In almost every case, you shouldn’t mix your federal and private loans.

As with any financial decision, it depends.

Think of consolidation like a student loan taco. (Bear with us here.)

Consolidation means combining all of your loans into one bigger loan. This may be tempting for a variety of reasons: You may want to make one monthly payment instead of many, maybe you want to lower the total amount you're paying each month or you simply hate your lender and want to take your business elsewhere. This gets complicated, ...

You might get a lower interest rate if you consolidate your student loans. It all depends on what kind of loans you have and whether you pay a fixed or variable interest rate now.

You can consolidate undergraduate student loans with graduate student loans. Just don't consolidate your federal loans with private loans because you might lose that lower federal interest rate.

You can't consolidate your college loans or your graduate school loans until after you graduate. But you should start thinking about student loan consolidation before graduation day arrives.