There are quite a few benefits to consolidating your federal student loans, making it something you should give serious consideration if you have such outstanding loans. These benefits include:

You have a single monthly payment. After consolidation, borrowers only have one lender, the Department of Education, making it much easier to manage the debt.

When you’re looking for a school loan consolidation to combine your many student loans into one payment, there are a lot of rules that you must follow, especially if your loans are federal loans. Here, we outline some of these rules to help you navigate the school loan consolidation maze.

There are two different school loan consolidation programs; namely, the Federal Family Education Loan (FFEL) and the Direct Consolidation Loan programs. It’s important to know the difference between the two. First, any school loan consolidation that you want combined have to be accepted by the Direct Consolidation Loan Program. Federal Family Education Loan lenders might accept all eligible loans for the FFEL consolidation, but some lenders might not include non-FFEL loans in the school loan consolidation. However, if a loan isn’t accepted in the Federal Family Education Loan consolidation program, lenders might offer alternative school loan consolidation programs for these debts.

It's the first of the month and you've received a fistful of bills for the many different student loans that helped pay for your education: Perkins, subsidized and unsubsidized FFEL or Direct Stafford, and PLUS. Your salary hasn't reached the six figure income you had hoped for yet. Each month you watch as your hard earned cash evaporates in educational loan payments while you live in a cramped studio apartment and drive a car older than you are.

You've heard about loan consolidation and the idea of making a smaller payment to one lender sounds like a dream compared to your current nightmare of feeding a seemingly endless stream of money to a number of different lenders. No contest--where do you sign up?

Rein yourself in for a moment. Consolidation may be the perfect solution to your financial woes and then again it may not be. So before you jump on the consolidation bandwagon, here are a few things you might want to consider.

Are Lenders Axing Consolidation Loans?
In an effort to remedy some inequities in the federal student aid programs, Congress recently enacted the College Cost Reduction and Access Act of 2007, which among other provisions, cuts lender subsidies that have historically been in place to encourage lenders to participate in the federal education loan programs. This legislation, in concert with the recent subprime mortgage credit crisis, has lenders taking a closer look at whether education loans continue to be profitable for them.

Higher education leaders anticipate that lenders may cut back on the Stafford and PLUS loan incentives and discounts previously offered to attract borrowers--and eliminate them altogether for consolidation loans. Consolidation loans, with the tightest profit margin of all education loans, may even be on the chopping block for some lenders while others may increase the minimum balance that qualifies a borrower for a consolidation loan.

Even if lenders back out of the consolidation loan business, consolidation is still available through the federal Direct Consolidation Loan program, but the government doesn't offer the incentives and discounts that lenders have long been using to attract borrowers.

Are Interest Rates Coming Down?

As most of the Americans use the credit card for almost all of their payments it is estimated that 80 percent of the Americans are under debt. Debt consolidation Service is there to assist them to get out of your debts. It is always recommended to reduce your number of credit cards and by this you can stay away from debt consolidation, as there won't be many bills for payment.

Debt consolidation service is offered to everybody like merging all the overdue arrears of electricity, Internet, telephone and groceries bills together or clearing all the debts of credit cards etc. The best method for doing debt consolidation research is by short-listing some big names and comparing their quotes. Like all your financial transactions, it is very important that the debt consolidation loan provider is a reputed company.

As you are aware there can be several types of student loan consolidation for you.  Broadly however there can be two categories.  These are Federal Student Loan Consolidation Plan and Private Student Loan Consolidation plan for you.  Consolidation is made applicable to both types of loans. 

Stafford loans, private and federal, subsidized or not are prime subjects for such student loan consolidation.  You can also consolidate the HEAL, HPSL and Parent PLUS loans availed.  The PLUS loan includes the federal direct loans, consolidation loans, and direct loans.  Other loans that could be consolidated are Perkins Loans and Nursing Schools Loans.