When you find yourself graduating from college with a ton of student loans one of the first things you want to do is try to get all of your loans consolidated fast. The foremost reason for this is simple. If you have five student loans, for example, each billing you a couple hundred dollars each payment you'll find yourself having to dish out a ton of money every month.

However, once your loans are consolidated you will only have to make a single payment every month. So once you've decided to go the consolidation route the next thing is find out the best student loan consolidation program for you.

The problem with finding the best student loan consolidation program is that there are so many programs out there to choose. How in the world do you make the right choice with all of the possibilities? The answer is you have to do your homework and research several programs. The reason being is that you want to find what works best for your current situation. Do you need a program that offers variable interest rates or would a fixed interest rate work best for you? Variable rates are great because they usually offer super low rates to start you off which means super low payments. Cool right? Not necessarily. Be careful with this because the scary thing about variable interest rates is that one minute your rates could be super low and next thing you know they've jumped up extremely high. Having said that you may want to take the safer route and go with a n interest rate that's fixed. While you may not benefit from any rate drops, you will have the comfort of knowing what your payment will be every month. Your rate will never change.

This is just one of the things to consider when it comes to finding the best student loan consolidation program. Also you should consider which program offers the best incentives, are there penalties for things like late payments, what does there repayment period look like? If you consider each program carefully you'll be much happier with your choice.