What does it mean to consolidate a federal loan?
If you have multiple federal student loans, you may determine that you want to combine them into one loan. This combined loan is called a consolidated loan. If your federal loans are in a grace period or in repayment, you may be eligible to consolidate your student loans. When you consolidate multiple loans into one loan, a few things will happen. The new loan will have a fixed interest rate. The new loan will enable you to make a single student loan payment each month (instead of the multiple payments you had been making). Your monthly payment will be lower (however, you will pay more in total interest by doing this). If you do combine more than one student loan, the amount you owe on each loan is added together and the interest rate is recalculated. The new interest rate is equal to the weighted average of all the loans being consolidated. This new interest rate will be fixed, meaning that the interest range will never change again. Before you consolidate your federal student loans,
