Learning all of the options for paying back student loans is one of the most time consuming and frustrating aspects of getting an education. From the moment you graduate, you can expect you get hundreds of offers from companies who would like to consolidate your student loan debt. This might make you feel like you’re supposed to consolidate, but that isn’t the best option for everyone. Today I wanted to give you some simple advice that should help you to learn how to pay back student loans in and effective and timely manner.

1. Write down each of your loans, terms, and the interest rates for each. One of the most confusing aspects of paying off and/or consolidating student loans is the fact that you will have multiple loans with different terms and interest rates. Some of your loans may have variable interest rates.

Putting each of the loans down on paper will help you to see which ones you need to eliminate or consolidate.

2. Find out if you’re eligible to consolidate. If you have higher interest student loans (above 7%), you will want to at least look into consolidation. After you finish school there will be a six month grace period and you can consolidate either during or after that grace period. You cannot consolidate before which means you can’t consolidate until after you’re finished with school. Most lenders will want to see at least $5,000 worth of debt and other won’t work with you unless you have over $10,000 in student loan debt.

This usually works for most people since the average amount of student loan debt is over $20,000.

3. Keep your low interest loans. Many of you will have loans whose interest rates are below 5%. If this was my situation I would make minimum payments on those and pay extra on my other loans. You want to always pay off your highest interest debt first and keep your other debt. Once you know out your high interest debts you can pay extra on the low interest ones.

You can also consider consolidating your higher interest loans, if that allows you to improve your interest rate.

4. Don’t consolidate to lower your payments, consolidate to lower your interest. Usually when you consolidate for lower payments, you’re simply extending the term of your loan. This usually extends the term of your loans to 20 years.

People often consolidate Perkins loans and other types of loans that have really low interest. They end up with lower payments because the term of the loan is double or tripled. This is generally a really bad idea because it increases the amount of interest you’ll pay in your lifetime by a huge amount. It would be a lot smarter to hang on to the low interest loans while getting rid of the others.