One of the biggest misconceptions about getting financial aid to pay for college is whether you can get a private student loan when you have bad credit, or no credit. The answer is that you can, but there is a significant catch involved. If want to get a private student loan when you have bad credit you are going to need to produce a cosigner or else you are going to find it virtually impossible to get approved by most private lenders. Private student loans without cosigner aren’t really in existence anymore every since the economy tanked and the credit-crunch took effect a few years ago, and putting in the effort to look for a private college loan when you have poor credit, or no credit is essentially a waste of time.
To get a private student loan without a cosigner you are going to have to either improve your credit situation, or convince the private lender that you can be trusted despite your lack of credit history. Unless you have some kind of Trump card waiting up your sleeve you can almost be guaranteed that you won’t be able to do this. Some people may have a considerable amount of cash reserves or other kind of asset waiting in the wings to show a private lender, and for these people there may be a chance at getting approved even though they have bad credit. For the majority of the population this isn’t really a plausible option, and because of this looking for bad credit private student loans without cosigner isn’t going to be a real alternative.
You shouldn’t lose all hope though if you cannot obtain a private student loan due to your bad credit history. There are still student loans no cosigner needed or required in existence, and while they aren’t private student loans, they can still provide a large proportion of the financing you need so that you can attend college. The loans I’m talking about are federal student loans, and they are non credit based student loans that typically do not require that you provide a cosigner or submit to a credit check. This is because they are based off of your need for aid, along with some other miscellaneous personal factors instead of your credit. This means that you can get approved without much of a hassle even though you do not have a substantial credit history and no cosigner.
The key to getting approved for these types of no cosigner student loans is to fill out the universal application for federal student aid, commonly referred to as the FAFSA. The FAFSA application is the only application you need to fill out if you want to make yourself eligible for some of the best federal loans that are out there, and once you are ready to apply you can either send in the form via mail, or fill it out online. Once you have sent it in you can expect to hear back from your college within about three to four months at some point during the springtime. Your school will send you an award letter with all of the federal loans that you may have qualified for, and within this letter should be both Stafford and Perkins federal loans. These are two of the most popular kinds of federal loans, and they come with very low interest rates and flexible repayment terms.
The bottom line is that you can get a bad credit student loan without cosigner if you look to federal loans first before private loans, and if you cannot come up with a cosigner then you should probably refrain from even applying for private loans. Private student loans should always be looked to as a supplementary kind of financial aid anyways due to their higher interest rates and overall costs, so if you are not sure about getting federal loans you shouldn’t be because they are a better loan when compared to the majority of private college loans that are out there.
