Refinance your student loans
Eligibility
To find a refinance through Credible, you must have more than $7,500 in private or federal loans (including PLUS loans) that are not currently in forbearance or deferment. The site will tell you immediately if your interest rate is already competitive, and thus not a good candidate for a refi.
Note that unlike with federal student loans, your credit is also a factor here: Credible does not pull your credit, but the lender may. According to Credible’s historical data, a credit score below about 680 will likely require a co-signer . Many of Credible’s partner lenders also consider factors besides credit score, like alma mater, major and employer.
Evaluate savings
You can easily estimate your potential refinance savings on Credible by plugging in a few key pieces of information, including the name of your school, your income, the amount of and interest rate on your existing loans and your credit score. The process takes less than 30 seconds and immediately returns an estimated savings based on similar borrowers who have refinanced.
If you like what you see, you can create a full profile, sharing additional information that will be distributed to lenders, which will send personalized refinance offers within three days and often in as little as 24 hours, Caron says. This replaces the traditional — and tedious — process of filling out an individual application for each lender.
Compare offers
These lender offers show up in your Credible dashboard, which is the site’s secret sauce: It allows you to easily sort and compare by monthly payment, APR, and the all-important total repayment amount, which can ensure you aren’t saving on your monthly payments by extending the lifetime of the loan, costing you more money in the long run.
“Our dashboard allows applicants to compare multiple personalized offers from multiple lenders. It gives you a good sense of the refinancing market, as opposed to receiving an offer from a lender and having nothing to compare it to. [This is] unique to Credible,” Caron says.
Once you’ve narrowed down your options to one, you click over to that lender to complete the refi process.
How does Credible earn money? It has various relationships with the lenders on the platform, earning a commission or fee when customers request a loan, complete an application with a lender, or accept a loan offer. There is no charge to you, and the loans you are offered are not impacted by the fee Credible receives.
Originate loans
Credible also connects borrowers to new private student loans (though you should maximize your ability to borrow federal student loans first by filling out
the FAFSA ). The loan origination process on Credible works much like the refinancing trail outlined above: You’ll plug in some information about your school, income, expenses and credit score and Credible will match you to lender offers, which you can then view and compare in the site’s dashboard.
The bottom line
Credible has many of the key players on its platform, including Citizens Bank and CommonBond, and is working to add more. These lenders offer both fixed and variable products with terms from 5 to 25 years, to residents of all 50 states. But some providers aren’t represented, so it’s worth doing some comparison shopping outside of Credible’s marketplace to make sure you cover your bases.
Finally, understand that when you refinance a federal loan with a private lender, you may lose some protections along the way: Federal loans offer flexible repayment terms, forbearance and deferment safety nets, and even
loan forgiveness in some cases .
You can apply to lenders individually or compare multiple offers through NerdWallet’s partner, Credible.
Follow the link below to fill out a brief form on Credible’s website. If you qualify, you’ll get immediate, personalized offers from multiple lenders without affecting your credit. If you continue with the process, the lender you choose will perform a credit check later on.
Arielle O’Shea is a staff writer at NerdWallet, a personal finance website. Email:
aoshea@nerdwallet.com . Twitter: @arioshea .
This article was updated. It was originally published July 14, 2015.
https://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/loans/student-loans/credible-marketplace-student-loan-refinancing/ 
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