How to Get the Best Student Loan Refinance Bonus

Hey, we're going to talk in this video about the best student loan refinancing bonuses that you can find anywhere. We're going to go over what you should think about when doing student loan refinancing and looking for a bonus, and is a cash bonus the only bonus that's available? And what about referral bonus programs that you might be able to get, like if you refer your friends? We're going to talk about all those things. We're going to talk about professional society discounts as well. So this will be a fun video if you want to save money by cutting your interest rate and also getting rewarded for it. So first off, student loan refinancing bonuses. In general, you can go on Google and search student loan refinancing bonus. You'll probably get some ads. There's Student Loan Planner up there, and there's other companies as well that have lists of student loan refinancing bonuses. Some of these things you'd find in Google search. Actually, it's interesting because the bonus programs, they actually just talk about refer a friend bonuses, which is not the same thing as a cash bonus when you refinance. So you can still get a refer a friend bonus after you refinance and that upfront cash bonus that you get for actually refinancing your own loan. So anyways, thinking about what kind of companies offer bonuses, I want to point out that these are going to change all the time. Historically, Student Loan Planner, we've been able to keep the biggest cash refinancing bonuses. Hopefully, that'll always be the case, but obviously, I can't guarantee it. So you should feel free to look around and see what else is out there. Also, keep in mind that there's also some places that will sort of promise free courses or something like that and assign a monetary value to those courses that's not actual cash in your pocket. So you do kind of want to look for what is the real cash bonus that you're actually getting. So again, these numbers are going to change, but at least on our website, all of the cash bonuses that you're seeing are as actual cash that you get. Now, the way that at least we do it is we try to pair, in some cases, a bonus from the lender and sometimes a bonus from us. So as an example, there's also limitations on how much you have to refinance to get a cash refinancing bonus. So for example, this earnest link here, you have to refinance more than 100K to get the $1,000 cash bonus. If it's 50 to 99K, then you're only getting 200, right? So most of these deals have specific terms like that where you're only getting a bonus in a certain amount if it's in a certain amount of debt that you're refinancing. How does this happen? How do people do refinancing bonuses? So most websites out there do earn some sort of advertising commission for having advertising and refinancing companies in their website, right, including Student Loan Planner, my company. If you think about it, advertising commission, that's going to potentially sway advice on websites as to whether or not you should refinance. So what we try to do to mitigate that conflict of interest is we try to rebate a portion of our earnings really right back to our readers that are refinancing on our website. So that's how we're able to do larger cash bonuses than a lot of other websites that you look around and see is because we just take some of that advertising commission and rebate it back to the end reader. So you can look and see variable interest rates, fixed interest rates. You can also read about each different company. But the best way to do this is these companies, at least the ones that I'm showing on the screen here, they represent maybe like 90% of all the student loan refinancing market. And I would check at least three. So here's an example, right? You check my rate. You just sort of put in your information. And the whole application process is pretty straightforward, right? I mean, really, you're probably talking something that might take like maybe five minutes at most to get an idea of what your rate would be with each of these different lenders. So when you get the prequalified rate, what you can do when you get that prequalified rate is you don't have to move forward with all of them. Obviously, you move forward with one of them if you want to actually refinance. So the first step is a soft credit check. They're actually not affecting your credit score at all when they're doing that soft check. The hard check comes when you decide, hey, I'll really like my prequalified rate and I want to go through the full process and submit everything. So at that process, what happens is they do a hard credit check. That's generally something that would knock your score five or 10 points in your credit score. So it's really not something that should ever be a big impact at all and it's a temporary impact. So the thing I tell people is if you're shopping for a student loan refinance, the only thing that you should be aware of is probably don't shop for a mortgage in the same week. You might want to spread out that mortgage shopping at least a month away and then you're not going to notice any impact at all. So for these cash refinancing bonuses, sometimes these lenders will have society discounts or professional association discounts that are better than the cash back bonus and then you can choose to apply that higher bonus if you want to. So that's not going to impact any of the bonuses you can qualify for if you apply through a site like ours. You're going to get whatever best bonus that the lender is offering. If it's a professional society discount, they'll ask you if you want to add it usually. Now in terms of the cash bonus, what we have our folks do is when you do refinance, you can use the contact on our website. The contact has let us know that you applied. We're able to sometimes confirm the amount that you are refinancing to know that it was credited to us and not some other source. That's because we have to get paid for the loan to be able to rebate some of that commission back to you and obviously the lenders don't share information with us as to what your identity is for privacy reasons. So that's kind of how we do it. Usually the lender is going to give you in a case with this particular program, the lender would probably give you $500 and we'd probably give you $500 to get to that thousand. So that's kind of the lay of the land and the best refinancing bonuses. Keep in mind in terms of refinancing your loans, you never want to refinance your loans if you've got some sort of subsidies going on. If you're going for some sort of loan forgiveness program, you lose those benefits if you refinance your student loans. If you're going for forgiveness, it's not an option anymore with private lenders. But the benefit of going private is you're kind of burning the bridge behind you. You've crossed the Rubicon officially and you know you're going to be debt free because that's your only option. And if you have that psychological win along with a lower interest rate, you are probably going to get out of debt faster because you're going to be motivated to pay extra and get rid of your loans. So I tend to tell people you want to get at least a 1% lower interest rate if you know you're paying your loans off to take them from federal to private. If you already have private loans, then the threshold should be even lower. You should probably refinance if you get a rate at least a quarter percent lower than what you have if your loans are already private because you're not losing any additional protections. And these cash bonuses, some people what they'll do is they'll start off with a 10 or a 20 year term with one lender with 200,000 loans and they'll pay it down to 100,000 and they'll switch to a new lender to get another cash bonus. That's something that people do. It's not something that you should feel pressure to do. Some people just want to be done with it and don't want to think about that. But it's kind of like a little bit like turning credit cards. You don't want to take it to an extreme, but there is a way to sometimes pick up one, two, even three bonuses over the whole lifetime of paying back your loans. So to get to these bonuses, you can just go on Student Loan Planner. You can go on Getting the Best Deal with bonuses or of course you can just type in Student Loan Refinance Bonus and compare our site to the other ones out there that you would find. But usually, ours are the highest. So if you want to shop around, obviously I encourage you to. But just know that if you do click on anything, a lot of times the attribution goes to wherever you first clicked. So if you want to get the biggest cash bonuses, I would of course suggest starting the search process on our website. So that's how to get the best student loan cash refinancing bonuses that I know of anywhere. If you have any comments, put them in the video below and thank you so much for watching.