Paying Off Parent Plus Student Loans

If you have a teen going into University and a bunch of kids down the lien going into school then you will probably want to know about the Parent Plus Student Loanda.

A Parent Plus Student Loan is a kind of federal student loan that is taken out by a parent on behalf of a child. These loans are never transferred to the student's names after they graduate. As the mom or dad you are always responsible for them.

This means that the student has absolutely no obligation to pay this loan, which kind of takes the pressure off the kid. But not off me. The parent loan is the easiest type of loan to get because of this. Thankfully student loan consolidation and refinancing measures are available for this type of parent-sponsored loan after you have had one out for a few years.

These loans can be gotten easily and very cheaply at low interest rates. However there is a hitch. There is no grace period of three months or so after the student graduates. Payments on these types of loans start immediately. You need to be ready with the money. However the sooner you pay it off the easier it will be for you in the long run. The sooner your kid gets a job after graduation the sooner you will be able to get payments from him and her as well.

Just as an aside it is also important to know that this type of Parent Plus student loan can never be a joint loan that is arranged between one parent and another. It can only be taken out by one parent – either the mom or dad. Two people cannot be responsible for it and only one name can be on the signed form. This is true even if the parents have been married for forty years.

Also these loans require a bit of paperwork. You have to take out one for each school year. So this means that the one parent will apply for the school loan four years in a row. This loan is typically acquired in the summer and half of the student loan is released out of an escrow type fund to the student in the fall and the other half in the spring.

I have the secret to cutting the interest on these student loans. You can immediately refinance them as soon as the second half of the loans is given to the student in the Spring. For example took out a Parent Plus loan in the first year. As soon as the second half of the loan is released you will begin to pay it off. Then your child may enter a second year of school. During that time you will likely take out a second loan. The secret is to take those two loans and consolidate them into one. Your payment will be much lower if you refinance the two loans into one rather than pay them both off separately.

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Saturday Morning Junk Food Commercials

Do you remember watching Saturday morning cartoons when you were a kid? The best thing about it sometimes was watching all of the different commercials for candies and cereal. Times have not changed much. Many parents still use the boob tube as a built in babysitter on Saturday morning. However unlike back when we were kids it is not so permissible diet wise to consume so many sugary foods. Yet these commercials play endlessly on Saturday mornings so your kids will bother you to eat some.

According to the Cleveland Health News most of the programming your kid's watch on Saturday morning is for foods that have lousy nutritional content. Researchers at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, (known as the Food Police) and student researchers the University of Minnesota studied a sample of 27.5 hours of show directed at pre-school and elementary school-aged children. They found four straight hours of what your kids could watch on Saturday morning was nothing more that food commercials. The programming sample came from the major networks so it is likely that they were watching what every kid in America watches on a Saturday morning. Talk abuts brain washing!

In fact, they found that 49 percent of the 4 hours of advertising was for food, and that 91 percent of food ads were for foods or beverages high in fat, sodium, or added sugars, or low in nutrients. These included advertisements for everything from potato chips to dessert items to soups.
Of the 281 food ads included in the sample, 59 percent were for products with higher levels of added sugar. One in five of the foods advertised had higher total fat content, levels of saturated plus trans fat, and sodium. As you may have guessed a lot of these ads were for take out food places like MacDonald's, Taco Bell and the like.
The food police concluded that this advertising mainly promoted unhealthy nutrition and that there were next to no ads marketing fruits, vegetables, low fat dairy products or whole grains. This of course may solve the mystery as to why our children seem to be so out of it when it comes to eating healthy food and so wildly desirous of junk foods, potato chips, creamy foods and snack foods.

One of the things that are sad about all of this is that it is just as easy to make an apple look 'sexy' to a child, as it is a Big Mac. The problem is that there is no money or motivation to make health foods look good to your kids on television. Psychologically these junk food ads can do a lot of damage as they train your kids to desire the wrong types of foods. They create cravings where they need not exist and once your kid gets the food they then create physical cravings for sugar and fat as well. Seeing the imagery for the food is what initiates the whole toxic cycle in the first place. Perhaps in Canada they have the right idea by getting these commercials banned in the first place.

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