Frequently Asked Questions

The Student Loan Calculator helps you to find all of the best options when you are looking to refinance or consolidate your student loans. We do this by providing you with a comprehensive list of lenders who are interested in working with you. We display all information in an easy to read, unbiased chart that showcases what each lender has to offer. This information includes a side-by-side comparison of items like; terms, APR, variable & fixed rates as well as a few other criteria that matter when comparing these lenders.

Generally, if you select a lender from one of our pages a “soft credit” check will be done on your person. This soft credit pull will not hurt your credit score and will help us as well as the lender to determine if you would be a good fit for our lending partners. Our lending partners have final say in offering the ability to refinance or consolidate your student loans.

To find out if you are eligible to qualify for our offerings, you will need to meet one or more of the following; You must be a US citizen or permanent resident in the United States and be at least 18 years of age. Anyone younger will not qualify for our program. You will also need to have a minimum of $5,000 in student loan debt to qualify for our student loan refinancing program. Please note that borrowers who are currently taking our money for student loans and are in a educational program or other form of degree may not qualify for the offerings on this site. Be sure to Contact Us with any additional questions you may have.

Unfortunately, one of the many qualifications in regards to refinancing or consolidating your student loans is that you must be a US Citizen in order to qualify with any of our lending partners. There may be some instances in which a case by case basis decision is made in which a user is outside of the country but may have a US address that they can use while they are away for business or travel that may allow for them to refinance or consolidate. Please send us an email if this is the case and we will look into this for you.  We can be reached at [email protected].

The Student Loan Calculator is 100% free to use.

Our lending partners work with both federal and private student loans that have been used to finance your education. This also includes Parent PLUS loans, so long as you are the primary borrower or the primary co-signer on each and every loan that you are interested in refinancing or consolidating.

Please note that if you do decide to refinance federal student loans that you may forfeit any perks associated with federal student loans upon refinancing or consolidating your student loans. We recommend that you do your research to get a better idea of the benefits of keeping your federal student loans.

You can find out much more on our company buy checking out our Terms of Service.

Yes, The Student Loan Calculator will work with students who have not graduated school or are no longer going to school. As long as you have eligible student loans that qualify for refinancing, generally meaning you have more than $5000.00 in student loan debt, you may be able to qualify to refinance or consolidate your student loans.

The Student Loan Calculator prides itself in having the largest comprehensive list of student loan refinancing lenders in the United States. With that being said we closely work with our lending partners to help offer competitive rates to our users. Our lending partners generally have terms that are between 5-25 years in length and have refinancing rates below 3.00% for qualified applicants. To see a further breakdown of our lending partners, feel free to head over to our lending partners page for more in depth analysis and lender overview.

The Student Loan Calculator is a website run through DBA, The Student Loan Calculator, a Newport Beach-based technology company. You can find more about our company here.

Don’t get discouraged if you did not get a offer at first. In many cases, a lender may be holding off providing you with a offer because they need some additional information before they will be able to proceed. Generally, the best guideline here is to read each email carefully from the lenders that you applied for and see if they indicated any additional information needed from you before they can make a decision. Some lenders may require additional income proof or may ask that you use a co-signer in order to be approved through their system. If you have a any questions regarding your approval or application process, you will want to reach out to the individual lender. As new lenders join the space and are approved to be used on our site, we will reach out should you be a good match for the new lender.

Not all lenders are integrated within our backend system. In the event that you have been qualified but are given a range of interest rates, you may need to continue the process through the lender’s website via their lender portal. Simply click on the button that shows “Request Rate” and you will be taken to the lenders website and form. Upon completing that form you should have a idea as to your specific interest rate.

Please note that you may be getting a range due to the different term lengths that the lender is offering. Choose the option that best suits you.

First, The Student Loan Calculator at this time does not in any form preform any type of credit checks on our clients. With our current model, we are sending you over to our lending partners website where you will fill out a quick form with question. At the end of the form, you will need to agree to a “soft” credit check in most cases. The soft credit pull does not harm your credit score, but will give a lender a better idea of your personal and financial history against this information that you have provided to that lender.

Upon being approved for a specific rate, at that the time lender will do a full inquiry on your account to have full access to your credit history. This will hit your credit when a full pull is made.

FICO score is the most commonly used score in the world to determine your credit score. They consider inquires for the same financial product within a typical shopping period (generally less than 30 days in most cases) as the “Rate Shopping” and will only count this as a single inquiry against your credit score. What this means is that you will have roughly less then 30 days to inquire about multiple lenders rates without your score being hit.

To find out more on credit scores in relation to student loan lending you can head over to this link: How do FICO scores consider student loan shopping?

Yes. In fact, many of our lending partners do consider clients who have a previous bad credit history and offer the ability for users to user a co-signer to help they qualify for refinancing or consolidation. Although having bad credit does not guarantee that you will be getting a offer from one of our lending partners, they will take this into consideration when determining if you qualify. The best way to see is to fill out the lenders forms and wait for a decision to be made. Alternatively, you can also user a co-singer to boost the possibility of your getting approved.

No. You can choose to apply independently or you may apply with a co-signer. You may, however, want to use a co-signer if you have a limited or poor credit history. By adding a co-signer who has established credit as well as a better credit history, you can often times qualify for better rates and terms depending on the lender. You will generally have the opportunity to add a co-signer through the lender form that you will fill out on each lenders website. From there you should have the opportunity to invite a co-signer to complete a profile and add their credentials backing you.

A co-signer can be any of the following; family, friend, relative, or other adult that is a US Citizen or other Permanent Resident that has a minimum annual income of at least $24,000. If you do default on the loan, then the co-signer is responsible to pay the loan if you cannot. Please read the lenders terms carefully before you do commit to a offer.

No. The co-signer’s will not be able to see your information. In fact, you will not be able to see each other’s profile at any point through out the approval process.

Yes. Most of the lenders on The Student Loan Calculator offer a clause where the co-signer can be released from the loan after a specific number of months. As with anything, please read the lender terms to find out more on the co-signer release as this will vary depending on the lender. To find out if the lender you are interested in offers a co-signer release option, you can head over to our refinance page or parent plus loan page.

Most of the lenders we work with will give you the opportunity to re-submit with a co-signer. This may not be the case for all lenders so do keep this in mind when you are working with a specific lender. In the event that they do allow for you to work with them in adding a co-signer, you may need to provide additional information or reapply altogether. To see if you can qualify to add a co-signer, please reach out to the lender in which you would like to add the co-signer and they should be able to let you know how to proceed.

Within The Student Loan Calculator portal, a co-signer is considered a user upon completion of their profile and submitting their form to be a co-signer for a user. Since this is the case through this site, the co-signer is subject to the rules for The Student Loan Calculator’s Terms of Service.

The Student Loan Calculator is a website run through DBA, The Student Loan Calculator, a Newport Beach-based technology company. You can find more about our company here.

The Student Loan Calculator is making an impact in the student loan refinancing and consolidation setting by providing a comprehensive list of lenders in the space while at the same time providing transparency to the industry. As with many things, not all websites are created equal. We are trying to change the status quo for student loan refinancing by offering a side-by-side comparison of our lending partners. This allows our users to be able to see benefits of multiple lenders at one time, something that up until recently was not possible. Our goal is to provide our visitors with peace of mind to help them make an informed decision on if refinancing or consolidating their student loans is the right decision. This is all done without hurting your credit score via a soft credit pull that our lenders will do on you.

Please note that we are not a bank and we are not the issuers of any type of loans. Our lending partners handle all of this. Please consult with a financial professional before deciding to refinance or consolidate your student loans. Again, we are not a broker for the loan and we do not offer financial advice.

Our lending partners offer us a commission upon having one of our users successfully refinance or consolidate their student loans. We will also get paid out a commission when a user takes out a loan for school via our private student loans. This commission does not hurt the user in any way and is not something that will hinder your rates. There are no pre-payment penalties or origination fees when partnering with one of our lending partners.

For answers that you were not able to find on this page, you may be able to find them on the following pages; privacy policy, terms of service, or security pages. All other inquiries can be made to: [email protected].

To get in touch with us directly, you can reach out to us at: [email protected].