I have loans from undergrad (subsidized) and grad (unsubsidized). I will be entering a PhD program this fall with a good enough stipend that I can make payments on my loans (I’d like to pay off as much as possible while I have relatively few expenses- ie no children )
So my question is: is there a way to have my payments be applied to only my unsub loans (assuming I’ve paid off the interest) or does it just get added to a general pile of federal loans (these are all direct loans by the way)?
Are all of your loans with the same servicer? If so, you should be able to log in to the servicer’s website and it will give you a breakdown of the sub/unsub loans, with options to make manual payments for each individual fund as you wish.
Talk with your loan servicer(s). Tell them that you want to make a payment and have it (or at least the amount of the payment above your required monthly minimum) be credited toward your unsubsidized loan. if the interest rates on your different loans from different school years vary, then specify that you want it to go toward the highest- interest loan. You may need to look at your promissory notes or other records to find out the loan numbers for each of your loans, then tell the servicer the # of the loan that you want the payment to go toward.
my daughter did this, paying off a high-interest unsub Stafford in its entirety, while paying the minimum on her sub loans. it may have taken an extra phone call or two for the servicer to get it right but it eventually worked out.
After unsub is paid off, then chip away at the sub loans (or Perkins loan) with the highest interest rate first.
It used to be that when you were in grad school, your loans went back into deferral and no interest accrued during the deferral period. But that may no longer be the case. (And back in my day, all the federal loans were of the subsidized type.)
Haven’t you received any letters about your loans since you graduated, detailing the total amounts borrowed, when you must start repayment, and what the monthly payments will be? The outfit sending the letters would be your loan servicer.
If not, then the national online service where you are looking things up should be able to tell you who your servicer(s) is/are. Or try calling your undergrad and grad schools’ financial aid offices.
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