Hellobee Boards

Mine are around 3%. I took out loans from 1995-2001
and consolidated them in 2002 at that fixed rate. I think they offered better deals for consolidating them then. However, I didn't qualify for any forgiveness of my loans because of when I took them out (congress didn't approve forgiveness of the loans during those years), so even though I have taught in Title one schools for years, I got screwed there. I think in the long run, you win!

@SweetiePie: I also only had loans for undergrad. I only went to grad school because my job was willing to pay for it.

But the undergrad loans were for a private school...so they were closer to what most people leave grad school with. Oh the decisions they trust 17 year olds to make for their future!

Mine were all federal loans and they were all around 5-6%.

DH is 3 years older than me and his undergraduate loans were all less than 3%. His grad school loans all had higher rates.

We both went to a public university so the tuition was cheaper than private universities so we were both able to get by with just federal loans.

My loans are all federal and my interest rate is 6.8-8.6%. It's awful.

I had 5% on my loans. I did not refinance them because I had some loan forgiveness through LRAP at law school for the first two years, then we incomes out. Then we had the option of Public Service Loan Forgiveness, but ultimately we didn't want to wait 10 years, so we just knocked them out hard in 5 years.

DH had a mix of federal and private and he originally consolidated to get a lower average rate bc one of his loans was ridick (his rates were somewhere between 6-8%) and then eventually did a refinance with DRB (now called Laurel Road?) for a very low but adjustable rate. He started at 2.85% and is currently at 3.58% after 2.5 years. It's still lower than today's current rates for a stable rate and it pushes us to work harder to knock it out since it is variable.

No matter what you do don't get a marriage consolidation.

I think older people will have lower rates. My loans are Dept of ed and taken out starting in 2009. They are all 6.8 and 7.8%. Total joke. I don't have any other lines of credit with rates that high)

My rate on private loans for law school was 1.5% and they knocked off an extra .25% for paying by auto debit. 2006-2009. I think federal were 2.5% at that time, so I only took subsidized federal loans.

I never refinanced because right around the time I graduated the economy tanked and my rates were better than anything I could get from refinancing.

So much of it seems to come down to when you took out your loans. The whole thing is such a nightmare.

I refinanced all my federal and private loans to a Bank of ND student loan. You have to be a resident of ND to get it. You do lose your federal loan benefits (loan forgiveness and income based repayment). They had two options: fixed rate (4.5%) and variable rate (1.5%). I normally would not do variable rate due to risk of it skyrocketing, but they had good terms- max increase was 1% per year and max overall rate was 10%. I knew I would have them paid off in 2 years, so the rate would increase to a max of 3.5% by the time I was done. In the end, my rate was 1.74%, so my gamble was well worth it.

I should add- all my loans were taken out from 2007-2011. Original rates were 6.8% for federal and 7.5% for private. I had a total of $94,000 when I graduated and had paid it off to about $80,000 when I refinanced to the Bank of ND loan.

I graduated undergrad in 2002, so it's definitely about the time you graduated. I was able to get a 2% interest rate at the time and paid both mine and DH's off early once we consolidated.