Refinancing a Loan

Hi, I'm Ray Jones with South Carolina Student Loan. I'm the Vice President of Loan Programs here, and I'm here to discuss refinancing options. Typically speaking, refinancing is nothing more than taking outstanding student loans that you have and refinancing them into one simple loan. So if you've borrowed in the past—a lot of our students borrow freshman, sophomore, junior, senior year, then they borrow through their graduate studies if they're going to graduate school and they have multiple loans out there. What refinancing does is allow you to apply so that we pay those loans off, and you have one simple payment through one source.

If you're a student and you've taken out loans in the past, one of the things that you need to understand are the terms that you have for those current loans. What do their interest rates look like? What is your total payment amount going to be after you go into full repayment on the loans? If those things are high, they're payments that you need to look to reduce. An interest rate that you may have received when you are a freshman entering college—It may be a little higher than the rate that you would receive in a refinancing program. Those are opportunities where you might want to go through a refinancing loan application to help reduce the interest that is accruing and help reduce the payment.

One of the things that we would say about refinancing is that you need to pay close attention to the rate during refinancing opportunities. You don't want to refinance very low-interest rate loans into a higher rate. So my advice is to check out our website and go through the "find my rate option" for our refinance program so that you can see and make really good decisions on how much that's going to cost you, what the interest rate's gonna be, and how much you're going to pay over time.