Getting College Financing Without The Need For A Cosigner
As the costs of education continue to rise from year to year it is becoming harder to source the funds necessary for a college education and more and more students spend more time thinking about raising the money needed than they do working at their studies. If this was not bad enough in itself far too many students discover that once they have left college they are saddled with so much debt that it simply drags them down and will probably take many years to pay off. If this seems to be a grim picture then for far too many students the problem of funding a college education is magnified by a requirement to raise the necessary funds without the availability of a cosigner for their loans.
These days college funding is not simply a matter of turning to one single source of finance for most students but is a matter of putting together a portfolio of funds from a variety of different sources.
The first port of call for every student must be to try to find college grants and scholarhips. Many students ignore this source of essentially free money completely and yet it is surprising just how many scholarships and grants are available today. In a lot of cases of course the amounts of money in question are reasonably small but even so can be very useful as one part of your total funding plan.
The next source of funding should be federal loan funding through schemes such as Perkins loans and Stafford loans which you can get as both subsidized and unsubsidized loans. Perkins loans are particularly useful because of their relatively low interest rate but are also the hardest loans to get and require students to show financial need.
Sadly at this point in spite of the fact that you will have begun to build your portfolio it is unlikely that this will provide you with sufficient funds and you will have to begin casting your net wider and will have two paths to follow.
If you are fortunate enough to have the assistance and support of either a guardian or parent then they could apply for a federal student PLUS loan to cover the shortfall between the money which you have been able to source yourself and the total cost of attending college. Student PLUS loans are subject to your guardian or parent having a fairly good credit history but the requirements are less strict than those which would be applied by a private lender.
If you have not got a guardian or parent you can turn to or simply decide to go it alone then you will have to secure a private loan and exactly how easy that will be will depend to a large degree on your own credit history. In the majority of cases lenders will be happy to grant you a loan if you have a good credit rating and will ask for a cosigner if you do not have a credit history against which they can make their lending decision or have a bad credit rating. However, with a growing number of people with a poor or bad credit rating today there is also an increasing number of lenders who will offer loans without the need for a cosigner and so it is simply a matter of shopping around.
Student loans with bad credit with no requirement for a cosigner will naturally cost you more than a standard good credit loan although if you take your time and shop around with care you will get a loan at a reasonable rather than exorbitant rate of interest.
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