Now would be a good time to look into a refinance. If your credit score is around 750-770 then you’ll most likely see refinance rates of around 4-6% depending on other credit history and debt/income ratio. The majority of student loan companies offer free rate checks based off a soft-check on your credit (which will NOT impact your score).
To max out your refinance hunt, try some of these steps as well:
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Get a list of quotes from credible first. Credible has a best rate guarantee that they will honor. Essentially, if you find a rate better than listed on credible.com (as long as it’s no longer than 10 days after the credible quote), they’ll give you a $200 gift card.
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Get quote from other companies, especially from SoFi and CommonBond. Some companies will match their competitor’s refinance rates (like the two I listed). So, if Earnest is best at 3.86% now, SoFi might be willing to negotiate an additional 0.1%.
Start by figuring out what you want for a term. The shorter the term, the less the interest rate is, but the higher your monthly payment will be. Consider thee shortest term you feel you can afford the payments on, and then go to the next term up from that.Also consider making extra payments or pay more than the amount due.
Once you know what you want for a term, you can shop around online and look at financial institutions in your area to see what the best rate you can find is. On student loan refinances a lot of places offer variable rate loans that look very appealing, but just be sure you understand that with a variable rate your interest could go up at some point.
Something I just thought of to keep in mind:
You might want to wait on refinancing if your loan if it’s a federally held loan. As part of the CARES act that was passed because of the Coronavirus, federally held student loans are not accruing any interest currently, and that lasts until the end of September. Every payment you make on your federal student loan between now then goes entirely to the principal of the loan. You might just have to make manual payments during this time if you had auto payments set up.
