What are PLUS loans? PLUS loans are loans that are available to everybody, even if they cannot demonstrate a huge amount of financial need. These loans are offered to the parents of undergraduate students. The loans are also based entirely on your credit history – so if you have good credit and a student going to college, then you should think about applying for one of these student loans. The reason that these loans are a good idea is that they have a much lower interest rate than a lot of the other loans that are available to students. Therefore, you should think of it as getting a lower interest rate as a reward for having good credit.
You can make sure that you keep good credit by making good credit choices, avoiding high interest rate credit cards and making sure that you do not go bankrupt at any point. If you have gone bankrupt, it does not mean that a PLUS loan is completely impossible. However, you will find it much harder to get a PLUS loan if you have had that degree of financial trouble in the past.
The PLUS loans will always have a lower interest rate than some of the other loans that are available for students. However, one thing that you should keep in mind is that the interest rate for PLUS loans is not stationary. This interest rate will change before each school year, so you should make sure that you find out what the next interest rate will be before you accept any PLUS loan offers.
There is one thing that you should consider before you decide to go with a PLUS loan instead of another type of student loan. That is simply that PLUS loans do not include a grace period like most other student loans do. Therefore, instead of being able to wait for nine months or a year before beginning to pay back student loans, you will have to start to pay back your PLUS loan within two months of the time that the loan was disbursed.
As a result, parents who have PLUS loans will have to begin to pay them back while their students are still in school.