Sourcing College Loans With No Cosigner

As the costs of education continue to rise from one year to the next it is becoming harder to obtain the money necessary for college and a lot of students spend more time worrying about raising the funds needed than they do concentrating on their studies. If this was not bad enough in itself far too many students discover that once they have left college they are left with so much loan debt that it quite simply drags them down and will take years to repay. Now, if this seems to be a grim picture then for a lot of students the problem of financing an education is increased by a requirement to raise the necessary funds without having a cosigner to their loans.College funding nowadays is not merely a matter of turning to one single source of finance for the majority of students but is a matter of putting together a portfolio of funds from various different sources.The first port of call for all students must be to look for scholarships and grants. Many students simply ignore this source of essentially free money altogether and yet it is surprising just how many scholarships and grants are on offer nowadays. In a lot of instances of course the sums of money in question are relatively small but even so can be very helpful as one part of your overall funding plan.The next source of funding should be federal loans through schemes like Stafford and Perkins loans which are granted as both subsidized and unsubsidized loans. Perkins loans especially attractive because of their low rate of interest but are also the hardest loans to obtain and need a student to show particular financial need.Unhappily at this point in spite of the fact that you will have started to build your portfolio it is unlikely that this will give you sufficient money and you will have to begin casting your net wider and here you will have two paths to follow.If you are able to obtain the assistance and support of either a guardian or parent then they could apply for a federal student PLUS loan to cover the difference between the funding that you have been able to source yourself and the total cost of attending college. Student PLUS loans are conditional upon the guardian or parent having a reasonable credit history but the requirements are generally not as stringent as those applied by private lenders.If you do not have a guardian or parent you can turn to or simply decide to go it alone then you will have to seek a private loan and precisely how simple that will be will depend very much on your own credit history. In almost all cases lenders will be quite happy to offer you a loan as long as you have a good credit history and will ask for a cosigner if you have no credit history on which they can base their decision or have a poor credit rating. In spite of this, with a growing number of people with a bad credit rating today there is also a growing number of lenders who are prepared to offer loans without the requirement for a cosigner and so it is merely a case of shopping around.A bad credit loan without a need for a cosigner will of course cost you more than a normal good credit loan although if you take your time and shop around with care you will find a loan at a fair rather than extortionate rate of interest.