Graduating/getting married to another med student

[indiamacbean]

Hi,
I am graduating in a couple of months from medical school and am getting married to another medical student. I had a couple of questions for people that are a bit smarter than I am about financial aid.
1. Economic hardship deferment- I only have about 50k in stafford/some unsubsidized stafford while my fiance has about 150k stafford/unsubsidized stafford. It seems then that she will qualify for hardship during residency while I won't just based on loan amount. So...is there a way of putting our two loan amounts together and having us both qualify for hardship? If we end up doing this what impact will this have on our credit in the future for buying a house? Is it considered that we each have around 100k debt or that we are each listed as having 200k debt.
2. Can we consolidate our debt together or does it make more sense to consolidate seperately. I guess this has something to do with question1. Sorry I am an idiot about this and I appreciate any help that people can give.

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[uptoolate]

I'm not sure if you were able to find an answer to this but my understanding of the situation is that if you consolidate with your spouse or combine education debt into, say, your mortgage- you lose some of the benefits of the student loan. For instance, in the event of death or disability, the educ. loan debt is forgiven. If you paired your debt with your spouse, the surviving spouse is stuck with the remaining debt. At least that is how I was counseled with I got married, refinanced our house, etc.

 

[mshheaddoc]

You are unable to consolidate debt with a spouse anymore. So there is no way that you will qualify for deferment jointly. You will not qualify for deferment most likely so you can claim economic hardship for a forbearance if you need to for 3 years. I would suggest you do this route if you really feel you can't make the payments, else I would just start paying on them. Are they consolidated loans on a 20 yr repayment? It would only be like $50 a month with the income the graduated plan is $25 (if you're even eligible for it) and in any reasonable area it probably wouldn't affect you that bad from a financial standpoint. I'd just start paying on them at that level.

 

[okbye]

Actually the payment would be quite a bit higher than that. 50k qualifies for a 25 year loan with a monthly payment of 349.41. Going with a graduated payment where you pay interest only for 2 or 4 years the payment would be 290.00. There is an income sensitive option that might give you a lower payment, I don't know how much that would be because they calculate it on an individual basis. That's assuming they are consolidated, if your loans are still separate the combined payments on the individual loans will be higher than that.

 

[mshheaddoc]

I apologize the $50 per month would be the income contingent at $45,000.

Interest Rate: 6.8 %
Loan Amount: $ 50000
Adjusted Gross Income (AGI): $ 45000
Marital Status: Married or head of household
Family Size: 2
State of Residence: Continental U.S


Repayment Plan Term
(in Months) Initial Monthly
Payments Total Payments
(Interest+Principal) Detail
Standard 120 $ 575.40 $ 69048.00
Extended 300 $ 347.04 $ 104112.00
Graduated
(see Note 1 below) 300 $ 287.70 $ 112122.25
Income Contingent
(see Note 2 below) 144 $ 508.88 $ 73265.99

http://www.ed.gov/offices/OSFAP/DirectLoan/RepayCalc/dlentry2.html