Can Your Student Loan Provider Find You?

So you are probably in the middle of finals and you really have no time to read a blog post which wants you to do one more thing, but you can thank me later, because its precisely because you are in that state of mind why I would like to remind  you of the following things that you need to do before your leave campus for the last time.

 

If you used student loans to help you complete your course of study, listen well.   

 

1. Get a list of all your student loans, your providers and servicers:  So you should have all the promissory notes from all the student loans that you took throughout your college career in your financial file, but just in case you don't, go to your financial aid department (you can probably do this online) and print out a list of all the loans.  If you are not familiar with which of your funding are loans versus grants, your financial aid department can help you identify them.  Grants do not have to be repaid, but loans do.  A correct inventory will come in handy for verification purposes, after all who wants to pay for loans they did not take, so use it to make sure that the list as the school has it is actually correct.   If you haven't been as involved as you should have been in this whole student loan process, bring your parent's in on this to help you verify, believe me they don't want you spending precious resources paying back some one else's loans, anymore than you do.   
2. Change your campus email address:  You probably have a school campus email address that you have used since you enrolled at college.  Give your school and student loan providers an email address that you will be checking regularly.   If you don't know this now, make sure that you remind yourself to do this.   Why am I suggesting that you change this address?  Well one of the things that happens after you graduate is that you move on to other things, hopefully a job.  You will over time not have a real reason to check your college email address on a regular basis and guess what?  As you have probably experienced, most of what colleges do these days are done via email, so when they are trying to contact you it's probably going to be by email.   Let's say they want to contact you about your student loan, their efforts may be going unheeded to an email address that you are no longer paying any attention to.  
3. Change your "snail mail" (physical address):   Make this change for the same reason as above.   Make sure you use an address where you can easily be reached.  If you had your parent's address listed as your permanent address, you may want to leave that as your current address, particularly if you may be going through a nomadic phase for a few years.  Of course using your parent's address is only helpful if its fairly permanent.   You could also use a post office box for some permanency.   But make a note on your phone or on your master to do list which says that whenever you move - update your address with the following people: a) Your college financial aid department, b) Your student loan provider(s) and c) at www.nslds.ed.gov.  It makes no sense to forward your magazine subscriptions but not your student loan contacts. 
4. Update your provider and school with your current phone number. 
5. Put a reminder on your phone or calendar to regularly update your contact information:  Make this at least a semi-annual task for you to verify that your student loan provider and your school's financial aid department has your current information (email address, physical address and phone number).   I would make mine a quarterly check, this way I would only be a couple months behind on the information.     
6. Put a reminder on your phone or calendar to check on your loan repayment date and schedule:  With a May graduation date, your federal subsidized and unsubsidized loans have about a 6 month "grace period" so your loans will be due sometime in October/November.   If you have Perkins Loans, they have a 9 month "grace period" so they would become due in January/February.  Verify this.   Contact your school for the repayment dates for any School Guaranteed Loans, and your private loan provider for repayment dates for those private loans.   I would want to get this information at least 3 months before its due so I can weave it into my spending plan, so don't leave it hanging out there too late.   
7. Put a reminder on your phone or calendar to check your provider's and your school's website to check for your student loan interest form:  This is a form that reports the amount of student loan interest that you paid during the tax year, (once you have started repaying your loan) which could help you reduce your taxable income.  Look for this form around the end of January each year.   Some providers mail out paper copies but the vast majority expect you to go out to their website to obtain it.  Lots of folks forget to pull it down and end up leaving dollars on the table... heads up. 

You will probably want to keep your alma mater updated with your contact information anyway, but if they are a holder of any your loans you should definitely make sure that the financial aid department has your current contact information.  


There have been cases where schools have not been able to locate students and they have escalated their student loan repayment efforts by filing lawsuits.   Avoid this by getting in front of the issue, be reachable so you can negotiate whatever is coming down the pike from a position of some control.   


Print this off and put it with your student loan repayment documents.  You'll be glad you did.


Sure, some people would prefer that they not be found, but at the current time student loans are one of those debts that are not easily removed by bankruptcy or otherwise so do the easy thing and keep your provider's updated on where you are.   Like all other debts, providers are usually more friendly if you keep them informed on how and when you will repay your debt.  They aren't so accommodating when they have to work to find you.  

Here is a previous post that talks about the consequences of defaulting on your student loans.